Auður Ólafsdóttir - Butterflies in November

“Feels a bit empty around here, have you changed anything?”

It has taken me four months to muster up the courage to mention the kitchen curtains, and I tread carefully.

“What’s wrong with those curtains?” he asks. “Mom made those and it was enough hassle getting them up. She went all the way to Reykjavík to buy that material and had to extend her stay by two days. My brother Daddi had to drive her all over the place until she finally found the fabric in Mjód. Then she insisted on sewing them here, so she moved in with the sewing machine and took over the entire living room. Two of her friends helped her to put them up. What’s wrong with the curtains?”

I stroke him like a cat, gently running my fingers over his tummy until he becomes totally docile. Afterwards he tells me that I can change the curtains if I want to, but that I needed to explain this to his mom, who already views me with plenty of suspicion because I’m skinny, boyish-looking and divorced and I make a living correcting papers.

“I feel there’s no need to have curtains in the kitchen,” I say. “Besides, there’s nothing but the sea in front of us. I feel I lose sight of the horizon with those frilly drapes up there.”

“So you want the place to look like a building site?” he says.

He’s gradually changing.

“What are you reading?” he asks. I tell him about the subject matter of the book as he looks back at me with an unfathomable air.

“I don’t see any point in reading a book that you’ve read before me, because then I’d be experiencing it after you, but I’d be willing to try being a woman and to see what it’s like to give birth to a child. I think it must be a totally unique experience to split into two,” says my muscular, macho sailor as he slips into a blue salt-beaten sweater that his mother knitted for him and must never be washed. He’s going off to sea.

The house stands below, virtually on the shore, almost unrecognizable. But it still has that same low ceiling, which a tall man could barely stand upright under. He is by the stove in a white, newly ironed shirt, holding a tray of freshly fished pink lobsters. Six boats are approaching land with their catch on the horizon, all of them with their lights on. They seem motionless, as if they were preparing a surprise attack, a raid on the village just after the evening news.

“It’s the location I fell for,” he says, nothing but the sea through the window. “It was empty when I moved here and I’d no idea it was connected to you in any way. Because I didn’t know you back then,” he says teasingly, “so I hadn’t even started to think about you.”

I walk from room to room in this both familiar and alien house, Tumi at my heels, and gently stroke the faded flowery wallpaper.

“I sandpapered and varnished the floor. Those are the original floorboards. The musty odour has gone now.”

I try lying on the bed.

“The place was empty when I bought it, apart from the bath in the basement and some boxes up in the attic, old stuff I couldn’t bring myself to throw away and that I haven’t had the time to go through yet. You’re welcome to take a look if you like.”

I speedily skim through the contents of the copybooks in Granny’s neat handwriting. It is the month of May, the rest of the date is illegible — humidity has eaten into some of the pages:

A gentle summer breeze after this morning’s rain. A boy is born at 16:40. The couple came to collect him at 18:10. The wind is shifting to the west. Everything is fine.

“I hope you’re hungry,” he says when I come down, “this is at least three kilos.”

The boy places three plates on the table and makes a fan and two rolled telescopes out of the napkins, which he sticks into the glasses, and then goes out to play with the pregnant dog in the garden.

“I got her as part of my divorce settlement,” he says, “she’ll be having the puppies in three weeks’ time, on 24th December, they’ll be my Christmas presents this year, along with some socks from my mom and whatever my daughters make at school. Last year I got a paper mobile sculpture from my daughter and a rug and muffler for the dog from my eldest. They miss the dog, we’re one in their eyes, the bitch and I.”

A photo of two adolescent girls sits on one of the bookshelves. The eldest looks slightly anxious and resembles him. The other is blonde with a part in the middle and a pigtail, fine features and a smile akin to that of the woman in the skiing outfit in another picture, standing between her daughters with her arms around their shoulders.

“That was the last holiday before she gave up on me and vanished with a pal of mine. I’m so unbearable to live with,” he says, coming right up to me so that I can smell his aftershave. I recognize it, Yves Rocher, Nature pour homme , the essence of manhood in a bottle.

“I mostly took care of the children while their mother was having her honeymoon, and now I try to go to Reykjavík to meet them at least every second weekend. We stay at my mom’s for the moment and she washes and irons everything for us and neatly folds it all into cases, one for her granddaughters and one for her son. I didn’t start wearing ironed underpants until after my divorce.”

Or perhaps he doesn’t actually say that; in fact it’s fairly unlikely in this setting, right in the middle of cooking, that he would have said something like that and mentioned ironed underpants.

“I’m doing the house up myself; I tiled the kitchen during my summer holidays. I admit the chessboard floor is slightly audacious.”

He stoops over the stove a moment on the carved stone tiles of the chequered black and white kitchen floor. He’s on a black square and I’m on a white one, with half a chessboard between us. Once he’s lowered the heat, he swivels around and moves forward one square, from a black one to a white one, so that we are now both standing on white squares, with just one black square between us, and we just have to stretch out our hands to be able to touch each other. But I need more time to think, so I make little moves at a time, first to the side, from white to black, and then back onto a white square again, as if I might even be thinking of leaving the kitchen altogether and vanishing. But I appreciate his appreciation of me. He launches a diagonal attack on me, like a true knight. His hand slides down my back at the same time as I start to feel something wet in the palm of my hand. It is the tongue of the drenched dog, followed by the boy at the other end of the leash.

“You’re just on time,” he says. “Food is ready.”

As I’m posting my latest translation, I take the opportunity to give Mom a call. I realize it’s not very sensible to have no phone, with Tumi in my care. What if he had an ear infection and I had to call a doctor? He wouldn’t know how to cope if something happened to me. He might run up the moor on his own instead of finding his way down to the village. I’ll buy a phone and immediately write down the emergency number for him on a piece of paper this evening and stick it on the wall beside Hercules.

“What kind of a man is he?”

“What man?”

“I wasn’t born yesterday, you haven’t phoned for two weeks, we were getting really worried.”

“He’s divorced, has two kids.”

“Does he still talk about his ex-wife?”

“Hardly ever, he showed me a picture of her, though.”

“He showed you a picture? He isn’t over her yet.”

“She was standing between their two daughters in the photo, he couldn’t have cut her out.”