Auður Ólafsdóttir - Butterflies in November

He paces the floor again and loosens his new green tie, as if the stale air of the muggy late-summer heat were smothering him. He has also just had a haircut and he is wearing a shirt I’ve never seen before.

“Let’s take the way you dress, for example.”

“How do you mean?”

“The guys all tell me their wives buy their lingerie at Chez toi et moi .”

“I’m just me and you’re you and we are us, I’m not the guys’ wives and you’re not the guys.”

“That’s exactly what I mean, the way you twist everything, I can never talk to you.”

“Sorry.”

“Men are more attentive to these things than you think. We mightn’t say everything, but we think it.”

“I can well imagine.”

He looks offended.

“And there’s something else. All you’ve got to do is touch a light switch and the bulb blows. It’s not natural to be pushing a cart-load of light bulbs every time I go shopping, minced meat and light bulbs, lamb and light bulbs, now I’m known as the man with the bulbs at the checkout.”

“Maybe we need to have the electricity checked.”

He paces the floor again.

“It’s as if you just didn’t want to grow up, behaving like a child, even though you’re thirty-three years old, doing your weird and careless things, taking short cuts over the gardens and fences of perfect strangers or clambering over their bushes. Whenever we’re invited somewhere, you enter through the back door or even the balcony, like you did that time at Sverrir’s; it would be excusable if you were at least drunk.”

“The balcony door opened onto the garden and half the guests were outside.”

“You’re always forgetting things, arriving the last at everything, you don’t wear a watch. And to top it all, you always seem to choose the longest routes everywhere.”

“I don’t get where you’re going with this.”

“Like that time you climbed halfway up that flagpole with the Icelandic flag in your arms. .”

“Big deal, we were at a party, there was a knot in the rope, everyone looked helpless and the flag was drooping pathetically at half mast, like a bad omen for the asthma attack Sverrir was about to have later on, on the evening of his own birthday.”

“That’s the only time I was grateful that you were wearing trousers and not a skirt. The amount of times I’ve prayed to God to ask him to make you buy a skirt suit.”

“Wouldn’t it have been simpler to just ask me?”

“And would you have done that for me?”

“I’m not sure, I thought you were just happy to know that I was well.”

“There, you see?”

“I realize I can be impulsive sometimes.”

“Impulsive, yeah, you always have the right word for things.”

He rushes into the living room and returns with two volumes of the Icelandic dictionary in his arms, frantically skimming through the first tome.

“Words, words, words, exactly, your entire life revolves around the definition of words. Well, here you go, impulsive: abrupt, hasty, headlong and impetuous. Wouldn’t you like to tell me how they say it in Hungarian?”

His anger seems way out of proportion to the argument. Still sitting on the stool by the table, I notice a butterfly hovering close to the toaster, which is unusual for this time of the year. It is settling on the wall now, close to me, and perches there motionless, without flapping its silver wings. If you gently blow some warm air on it, it is clearly still alive. I swallow twice and remain silent.

“Those were my colleagues and Nína Lind was there too, she remembers it vividly. How do you suppose I felt?”

“Who’s Nína Lind?”

“Your hair is shorter than mine,” he says wearily, stroking his thick mane. He has taken one of his hands out of his pocket.

“And?”

“And then there are those friends of yours.”

“What about them?”

“Like that Auður girl, fun in some ways but a total crackpot. And with another fatherless child on the way.”

“That’s her business.”

“Yes and no, it’s been one year since we moved in here and we haven’t emptied all your boxes yet. I get the impression this home doesn’t really mean that much to you.”

“We need to find time to do that together.”

“You have a pretty weird idea of marriage, to say the least, you go out jogging in the middle of the night, dinner is never at the same time. Who else — apart from Sicilians — do you think would eat Wiener Schnitzel at eleven? Then when I get home on Tuesday you’ve cooked a four-course meal on a total whim, a Christmas dinner in October. And there’s me clambering over your sneakers in the hall holding a pizza with some awful topping in my arms, just to have something to eat. And who did the shopping again this evening? There’s no organization in your life, you can’t be sure of anything. It’s very difficult to live with these endless fluctuations and extremes.”

“You yourself often work nights or are abroad, you’ve only been at home for four nights this month.”

“I mean you speak eleven languages that you practically learnt in your sleep, if your mother is to be believed, and what do you do with your talents?”

“Use them in my work.”

“Having a child might have changed you, smoothed your edges a bit. But still, what kind of a mother would behave the way you do?”

It was bound to reach this point, the baby issue. But I’m a realist so I agree with him, I wasn’t made to be a mother, to bring up new humans, I haven’t the faintest clue about children, nor the skills required to rear them. The sight of a small child doesn’t trigger a wave of soft maternal feelings in me. All I get is that sour smell, imagining their endless tantrums, swollen gums, wet bibs, sticky cheeks, red chins, the cold dribble on their chins. Anyway, it isn’t motherly warmth that men come looking for in me and they’re not particularly drawn to my breasts either. Besides, there are plenty of children in the world, our national highway is full of cars crammed with children, I should know. Three or four pre-school toddlers escaping from their young parents’ cars to raid every petrol station shop along the way. They need hot dogs and ice creams, after which they’re packed into the cars again, reeking of mustard, their faces plastered in chocolate. The parents look tired and don’t even talk to each other, don’t communicate, don’t notice the dwarf fireweed or glacier because of their carsick children. Your kids vanish into the bushes of camping sites, without ever giving you a chance to browse through a thesaurus in peace by the entrance to the tent, because you’re always on watch duty, I imagine. Some of our friends haven’t had a full night’s sleep for years and no longer make love, except for the very occasional little quickie. These are people who don’t even kiss any more, when they collect each other from work they just turn their heads and gaze out of the windows of their cars. I know that much, I’ve seen it. The relationships that survive having children are few and far between.

“You should at least organize yourself better, otherwise you’ll never be able to cope with having a child,” I hear him say to the broom cupboard.

If one really put one’s mind to it, it might be possible to develop the ability to read two pages of a book in a row. The child has grown suspiciously silent, the cookie is probably stuck in its throat, which is why you have to check on it every four lines, you’re always either putting a child into a sweater or pulling it out of one, shoving Barbie into her stockings and high heels, groping for your keys outside the front door with a sleeping child in your arms. No, it’s not my style. I try to regurgitate an entire paragraph from a manuscript I once proof-read: