Auður Ólafsdóttir - Butterflies in November

“Well then, Happy New Year in advance and thanks for the four years of marriage, plus the 285 days and seven hours.”

I finally break her open and rip out her bleeding heart, surprised by the appearance of the creature’s innermost entrails. The heart is so small it would fit into the palm of the hand of a newborn child.

I kiss the small bleeding palm and his hand, smearing my lips in red. That’s what my classmate Bergsveinn was like in the eighth grade, with blood-red lips. I, on the other hand, had long brown hair with bangs. Our religion teacher once told him that he had kissable lips. Bergsveinn blushed, increasing the blood flow to his lips even more. But the religion teacher was a married man, so it was clear that he was teasing him for the sake of us girls in the class. After that, all we girls in the class learnt that not all lips are equally suited to all tasks. This is how a woman can suddenly learn what she can expect from life.

Detach the tiny fingers protruding from the heart, by pulling them out one by one, like a midwife retrieving the bloody newborn child from the arms of a fifteen-year-old girl to deliver it for adoption. There is no way of discerning from the cry, as it is being carried away, whether it is a boy or a girl. Some say the cry of a boy is more delicate, fragile and feeble than the cry of a girl, boys who have no natural fluff on their heads and wear light blue hoods. He, however, has a big mass of dark hair. The woman is from the east of the country, not very young. I only catch a brief glimpse of her and say nothing, buried under the pillow. I’m not sure the crying can be heard for long because the corridor stretches far away, the coffee percolator is brewing and the singing of the plover that has recently returned from the southern hemisphere can be heard through the window. Because it is spring, one can smell the perfume of the woman who is driven away with the baby in the car. She is sitting in the back with the child enveloped in a small down quilt, her husband alone in the front.

I could, of course, delve into all kinds of regional variations of chicken, pigeon or duck recipes, marinated goose, sautéed in butter and sprinkled with ground pepper and thyme or roasted very slowly for a long time in the oven, while I nip off for a swim and steam bath in the meantime and pop into the bookshop to see if my order has arrived. I also consider following an Irish recipe, which consists in letting the bird simmer in a pot for four hours with onion and stuffing, while the evidence erodes away, and then fry it. The solution comes to me in a flash; I try to merge several recipes, mixing unrelated flavours in an unexpected way.

In fact, the major challenge and biggest obstacle I have to face in any of my cooking is the cutting of the onion. My vulnerability to the onion isn’t comparable to my vulnerability to any other aspect of my life. It is standing unpeeled on the table and I’ve already started to cry. I take off my wedding ring and place it at the top of the draining board, behind the bird’s gutted entrails. I brandish a knife and my eyes immediately well with tears. I can’t see a thing, but nevertheless blindly stick to the task at hand, groping for the second onion and then the third and have ceased being able to see the book ages ago. I fumble and zigzag into the dining room, searching for the balcony door where the chives are still steadily growing in their pot, even though we’re in October.

“You’re far too sensitive for this world,” my neighbour from downstairs said to me once, when she saw my violent reaction to onions one day as I was staggering outside to try to focus on the world again. These are the kind of things women say to other women. Even women who sleep with your husbands. After some time they phone you and say: “He isn’t exactly the way I thought he’d be, sorry,” and they even want to meet up with you in a café and form a book club.

When my husband opens the door with yet another new tie around his neck, I’ve already opened both of the bottles of wine that were being kept for the next special occasion. He immediately mentions the peculiar smell in the apartment, which the well-seasoned bird in the oven fails to mask. It’s true that there are some feathers in the kitchen and bathroom, and even one feather on the bed, as I discover later that evening, as well as several bloodstains sprinkled on the parquet.

It had been a difficult operation.

We normally sit face to face to feel each other’s proximity, but we now sit at the far extremities, each occupying their own end, since I’ve extended the table by two leaves, both because we’re separating and also because it gives the occasion a festive air. There is a huge gap between us, the vast distance between conciliation and separation. On the white tablecloth there are new candles in tall brass candlesticks and six side dishes with all the things he likes: baked potato wedges, home-cooked red cabbage, French beans, carrot mousse, salad and succulent redcurrant jelly, made from berries out of Auður’s garden.

It occurs to me that this may be my last chance to ask him about things I haven’t asked him up until now.

“How is your mother?”

“Fine, thanks. And yours?”

“Good.”

“Thanks for everything,” he says, visibly moved.

As soon as he wants to speak, I will allow him to, because I’m a woman and know how to remain silent. He hasn’t prepared a speech.

“You’re welcome.”

“I just want you to know that I’ll never forget you.”

He doesn’t say that he will cherish me in the depths of the blood-red chambers of his heart, because he would never put it that way.

“Thank you.” I refrain from replying likewise, at moments like this one doesn’t necessarily say what one is thinking.

“I won’t say it was exactly the way Mom does it, but there was something special about it, something personal.”

“Thank you.”

“It was wonderful to meet you. . I mean marry you. . and live with you. . but sometimes things don’t turn out the way you expected. . but differently. . you’ve also been quite busy lately. . we haven’t seen much of each other. .”

He has stood up and I realize how tall he is, he is literally towering over the table. He hands me a parcel wrapped in gilded paper, after fishing it out of the inside pocket of his jacket. I finish the remains of two glasses before opening it, exhausting my annual ration of alcohol in a single day.

It’s a wristwatch.

“Thank you, you shouldn’t have, I don’t have anything for you.”

“It has a calendar, so you’ll be able to see both the time and the date. Forewarned is forearmed,” he says with a smile.

In addition to the calendar, the watch has two dials, a bigger one that says HOME and a smaller one that says LOCAL, the local one presumably indicating the time of the place where one happens to be at that moment. They both therefore follow their own time.

“A bit like you,” he says with a touch of warmth.

It is true that I didn’t actually have a watch, but I do have a compass in the car that has always enabled me to find my way, even though I may not always know the precise time in terms of minutes.

He stands behind me at the table and loosely places his hand on my shoulder, as he explains the watch to me. I sense a creeping weakness in my body and suddenly feel that this relationship still stands a chance that entirely hinges on me being able to dissimulate the fact that I know how to read the time, that’s my trump card right now. Because I’m a woman and he’s a man.

“So you can set whatever time you want on one dial, free time, your own personal time, whereas the home dial will show you the time we other ordinary, boring, mortals live on,” he says in a soft voice. “Do you have any plans?”