Auður Ólafsdóttir - Butterflies in November

“Things that no one will be expecting will happen, people will experience a lot of wetness, short-sightedness, greed, isolation, more wetness.”

“How do you mean wetness?”

“It’ll wet more than your ankles, that’s all I can say, impossible to know anything more than that today. I do, however, see a large marine mammal on dry land.”

She pauses briefly, there is a dead stillness in the room.

“There is a triple conception,” she continues, “one of them may be a trinity.”

What does the woman mean?

“My brother had test-tube triplets, they’re two years old now,” I awkwardly interject.

“I’m not talking about them,” the woman snaps, “I’m talking about three pregnant women, three babies on the way, three women who will give birth to babies over the coming months.”

“Well, there’s my friend Auður. .”

Fortunately, she clearly has no interest in my input and shuts me up with a dismissive wave of the hand, as if I were an irksome teenager interrupting her private dialogue with some invisible being.

“And then there’s a big boy here, an adolescent, a narrow fjord, black sand, dwarf fireweed, the mouth of a river, seals nearby.”

Another one of her pauses.

“There’s a lottery prize here, money and a journey. I see a circular road, and I also see another ring that will fit on a finger, later. You’ll never be the same again, but when it’s all done, you’ll be standing with the light in your arms.”

Those were her words, to the letter, “with the light in my arms”, whatever that was supposed to mean.

“To summarize it all,” she concludes in the manner of an experienced lecturer, “there is a journey here, money and love, even though you can expect some odd twists along the way. But I can’t see which of these three men it will be.”

When I finally stand up, I notice that she has placed all the cards on the table and arranged them in a strange pattern that is not unlike the one formed by the pile of wood outside, some kind of spider’s web with broken threads.

I suddenly feel the urge to ask:

“Did you make that wooden structure outside?”

She fixes her gaze on me, her pupils piercing through an ocean of shimmering blue:

“Keep an eye on the patterns, but don’t allow them to distort your vision, it takes a while to develop a good eye for patterns. Nevertheless, if I were in your shoes, I wouldn’t allow myself to be led into marshland in the fog. Remember that not everything is what it seems.”

As I’m about to hold out my hand to say goodbye, she suddenly embraces me and says:

“It wouldn’t be a bad idea to buy a lottery ticket.”

Her two adolescent sons offer to escort me back to the car, which I’ve forgotten where I parked, seemingly quite far away. Marching on either side of me, they look on with determined airs, as if they’d taken on a mission that had to be accomplished at all costs. We walk for what seems like a very long time, I even get the impression we’re travelling in circles and can’t remember ever coming this way. Then, just as I’m beginning to feel totally lost, the car materializes in front of me, close to a sea wall, in a place I don’t remember leaving it. It is unlocked, as usual, but all the papers are in their proper place, although I couldn’t vouch that every single sheet is in its pile. I see no point in checking on the goose in the trunk. As I say goodbye, I realize for the first time that the brothers are twins and notice how they both always seem to shift their weight to their right legs as they walk. There is something odd in their gazes, pupils like black pins in an ocean of shimmering blue. As soon as I turn the key in the ignition and am about to wave them goodbye, I realize they’ve evaporated into thin air.

He’s home. I linger on the frozen lawn before entering, looking in at the light of my own home, and shilly-shally by the redcurrant bush with the goose in my hands, wondering whether he can see it on me, whether he’s noticed. From here I can see him wandering from room to room for no apparent reason, shifting random objects and alternately flicking light switches on and off. I move from window to window around the illuminated home, as if it were a doll’s house with no façade, trying to piece together the fragments of my husband’s life.

Then he has suddenly emptied the washing machine and is standing in the bedroom with all the laundry in his arms, something he doesn’t normally do. He’s not much of a handyman either, but for some odd reason he seems to have changed the bulb under the porch and fixed a cupboard door in the kitchen. All of a sudden he is staring out the window into the darkness and I feel as if he were looking straight at me, scrutinizing me at length, as if he were pondering on how we might be connected or whether I’m going to come in or remain in the garden. He is naked above the waist, which must be quite chilly for him with that wet laundry in his arms, unless he is insulated by his body hair. When he bends over the bed, for a brief moment, I get the feeling there is someone lying on the bed, below my line of vision, and that he is about to lie down beside the person, but then he suddenly springs up again with my light blue damp panties in his hands, which he carefully stretches and presses in his big hands. He hangs them on the drying rack he has set up by the bed. I now see four pegs tugging at the extremities of my underwear. He may not spend much time at home and we may not talk much, but I have a good husband and I know I’m the one to blame, I never went to the shops.

He has obviously cleared up the kitchen and left a plate on the table for me, complete with knife, fork, glass and napkin. He has put on a shirt and tie, as if he were on his way out to an urgent meeting, and slips on the thick blue oven gloves, before stooping over the stove to pull out the lasagne.

He doesn’t sit with me, but tells me that he needs to talk, that we need to talk, that it’s vital, which is why he is pacing the chequered kitchen floor, in straight lines from the table to the refrigerator and then from the refrigerator to the stove, without any discernible purpose. His hands are burrowed in his pockets and he doesn’t look at me. I sink onto the kitchen stool, with my back upright, still wearing my scarf.

“This can’t go on.”

“What can’t go on?”

“I mean you’ve had your past abroad, which I’m not a part of. Initially, I found all the mystery that surrounds you exciting, but now it just gets on my nerves, I feel I can’t reach you properly, you’re so lost in your own world, always thinking about something other than me. It’s all right to hold some things to yourself, maybe fifteen percent, but I get the strong feeling you’re holding on to seventy-five percent. Living with you is like being stuck in a misty swamp. All I can do is grope forward, without ever knowing what’s going to come next. And what do I know about those nine years you spent abroad? You never talk about your life prior to me and therefore I don’t feel a part of it.”

I note that he refers to a swamp and mist, just like the medium had.

“You never asked.”

“I never get to know anything about you. You’re like a closed book.”

I feel nauseous.

When I was seven years old, I was sent on a bus to the countryside in the east on my own for the first time, with a picnic, a thirteen-hour drive along a road full of holes and dust, which the passengers ground between their teeth, in the coldness of the early June sun. The novelty that summer was that the bus companies had started to employ bus hostesses for the first time. There was a great demand for these jobs because the girls got to dress almost like air hostesses, in suits, nylon stockings and round hats fastened under their chins. The main function of the hostesses, apart from sitting prettily on a nicely upholstered cushion over the gearbox and chatting to the driver, was to distribute sick-bags to the passengers. When I had finished vomiting into the brown paper bag, I put up my hand the way I did in school whenever I needed to sharpen my pencil, and then the hostess came, sealed the bag and took it away. I saw the pedal on the floor right beside the entrance that she pressed with the tip of her high-heeled shoe to open the doors, which released a sound like the steam press in the laundry room, and how, with an elegant swing of the arm, she slowly cast the paper bag into an Icelandic ditch. The driver kept driving at fifty-five kilometres an hour and seemed relieved to be able to carry on chatting to the lady on the cushion once the problem had been solved. Looking back on it, I think it more likely that the hostess was not wearing a hat but a scarf. I’d assumed they were a couple and engaged, she and the driver, but now realize she must have been two years out of the Commercial College whereas he had been driving the bus for decades.