Auður Ólafsdóttir - Butterflies in November

“The women around here try to entertain themselves at night as best they can.”

He doesn’t lack nerve for such a young man.

I count some thousand-krónur notes at the cashier and then dash out to the glove compartment of the jeep to get some more. It is only then that I remember I left the boy’s old boots in the shoe section and rush back in to get them. By the time I return, Tumi has vanished.

“He went out to his dad,” the youth at the cashier informs me.

I see the familiar figure of a man standing outside in the car park, holding a big bag. It’s my friend from the landslide. The rainbow-coloured reflections of the Christmas lights shimmer in the puddles. Tumi is standing right up close to him, holding onto his exclusive outdoors jacket, and once more I hear him say Daddy in a resonant voice. The man doesn’t budge, but stands there as naturally as if he’d been waiting for his son and wife, who rushes out after her child. I see him stroking the boy’s head and then back-stepping slightly to crouch down and speak to him in sign language. The boy is taken aback; he is more used to talking to people who don’t know sign language, but suddenly has something to say with his hands, face and whole body. Who would have thought that so many images could have fitted into such a small, pale body?

“Hi, how are you, did you think I was an elf?”

“The thought had crossed my mind.”

“I wouldn’t mind experiencing more of those tales with you.”

At that same moment, the clerk emerges from the store room with the bicycle, carrying it over to the car. He has finished screwing the training wheels to it. My friend and I stand in silence, side by side, and watch the boy clamber onto the seat of the bike and cycle between the puddles in the midday twilight, like proud and slightly apprehensive parents releasing their offspring into the world for the very first time.

When I’ve loaded everything into the jeep and am about to drive off, he says:

“I can teach you sign language if you like, give you some private tuition, I have a deaf sister. The boy can play with my dog in the meantime, she’s very gentle, tolerant and child-friendly. She’s about to have puppies soon so she’s a bit sensitive and not in the mood for too much horseplay right now.”

With the hint of a smile, he opens his bag slightly to allow me to peep inside. There can be no possible doubt: red, white, black, a coat, beard, belt, furry lining — yet another Santa costume.

“I was just collecting it from the dry-cleaner’s, the season is about to begin. This is the second time I’ve been appointed as a Santa Claus, obviously because I’m not a local. Children get suspicious when they meet their fathers in disguise and die of shame when they see them making fools of themselves in public. Families have plenty of other problems to be dealing with,” he says with his alluring smile. “Besides, makes a nice break from my routine, getting to be someone else. This’ll be my last Christmas here; then I will have had the change I needed in my life.” He combs his hand through his thick, unruly hair and looks up towards the mountain road, as if he were trying to find his escape route.

As we say goodbye, he tells me he’ll come and visit us one night, when the boy is in bed in his pyjamas and about to drift into his dreams.

“Then I’ll knock on your window and sing a song or tell you a story. Unlike many of my fellow Santas, I have the advantage of being able to play the accordion. If nothing else I can slip a little gift into his shoe.”

There are two bedrooms in the chalet and we sleep in one of them with two gas heaters. Tumi is responsible, and we help each other to clear up and make things cosy in the newly planted chalet that smells of Norwegian wood. Water runs out of the tap when it is turned. Through the window, there is a view of the Ring Road.

We play outside in the ten-degree heatwave, sheltered from the rain by the edge of the roof, which stretches over the deck.

He adroitly cycles in clean ellipses and by now has mastered the skill of taking sharp turns on the training wheels. He rings his bell every time he passes the deckchair I’m lying in, studying the conjugation of sign language verbs. He can hear the bell too. I wave at him and sip on some hot tea.

It’s important to address the verb to the right person, the book tells me; that seems pretty logical to me.

Tumi nods his head to indicate that he’s understood me, that I’m making progress, he’s a good teacher. He just doesn’t have the time to talk to me at the moment, we can’t always be yakking together, because he needs to use his hands for something else. He has started to draw.

I suggest we go off on a reconnaissance mission and fill the thermos with cocoa. We take an extra cup with us.

The murderer who slaughtered his brother is now ageing in the Geriatric Health Centre. He chisels pieces of wood and makes children’s toys to keep himself busy and kill time until he goes to meet his brother. We are escorted down a corridor to his bedroom, which faces the mountain road. An odd odour hovers in the air, a mixture of strong detergents and weary personal objects that have been removed from their original setting: a chest of drawers, chair, kitchen clock and old family photos in silver frames. A large portrait of his departed brother hangs over his bed. He receives us in chequered slippers.

The table in the bedroom is crowded with little carved figures, skinny, elongated beings with no ears. Their eyes are the heads of nails that have been hammered into them and sometimes pierce their necks. Garments have been painted onto their carved bodies in red, blue and green. On the bedside table, two porcelain hands intertwine to form a ceramic flame. I was later to discover more lamps of this kind around the village. I unscrew the lid of the thermos and pour cocoa into the two men’s cups. They sit side by side close to the bed. There’s eighty years between them.

“I remember your granny very well, she was so gentle and shy, your granny was, when she was a young girl. We used to pop in there sometimes, me and my brother, to drink some coffee with a sugar cube and jam cake.”

He cautiously sips the cocoa from his cup, sinking into a long silence.

“She was a warm lady with a serene mind, your granny was, never judged anyone. That was an accident with my brother Dagfinnur. And the woman who took the child was good too. Your granny was a bit upset by the whole business. That it all should have happened while the girl was staying with her.”

He takes another sip from the cup and shuts up; he’s got nothing more to add.

I tell him I’ve come to take a look at the toys. He doesn’t have that many at the moment, but he pulls out a truck with a red cabin and rubber wheels — beside his chamber pot.

“These aren’t obligatory,” he says, “but I can’t be bothered getting up five times every night. Some of my mates have sinks in their rooms that they can piss into, not me.”

No such thing as privacy in here, everything is public knowledge. He ties some string to the truck with his trembling hands so that the boy can tow it down the linoleum floor in the corridor.

An almost imperceptible high-pitched sound awakens me in the total darkness of the night. I sit up to locate its source. No doubt about it, the boy is humming in his sleep in a different voice to the one he uses during the day. His duvet is on the floor. As soon as I pull it back over him, the sound seems to be cut off. He sits up, awake.

“I’m blind.”

He gropes through the air, searching for his thick-lensed glasses, and I turn on the light so that he can see me talking to him.