Butterflies in November

FIFTEEN

I’ve decided what I’m going to do when the moving van backs out of the driveway and I’m left alone in the virtually empty apartment. I’m going to take a bath.

I wait another five minutes before turning on the tap and undressing. The top bathroom cupboard is open and empty. His shaving gear, cream and deodorants have been cleared away, although he has left his toothbrush and aftershave. Now that I have all the time in the world to myself I can do as I please. I feel perfectly fine on my own and, in a few moments, the bath will be ready. I add some hot water and sprinkle it with a cocktail of elements coming from a variety of bottles my friends — mainly Auður — have given me on different occasions: relaxing oils, soothing drops, energy-giving bath salts, rosemary oil, camomile, lavender, jasmine. I fetch a glass of cognac and place it on the edge of the tub.

A relaxing bath feels like a fitting way to start this first hour in the first square of my new life, allowing the water to run down my neck, over my face, down my throat, all over me, as the salts froth all over my pale body. I just wallow there in the middle of the tub, banishing every thought and image. How many mothers get a chance to stretch out in a hot bubbly bath like this? With drooping eyelids, enveloped in water, to just lie there in peace in neutral territory, while most kindergartens are closing their doors? A fifteen-centimetre buffer separates me from the world of warfare and potential domestic strife.

From that point of view, I’m a woman with no distinctive features, no visible scars, just one tiny beauty spot on my pale skin, dark hair and green eyes, as specified in my passport. And because I don’t have to help a child to brush its teeth and get into its pyjamas and read the same story to it for the seventy-ninth time, I could very easily run another bath in two hours’ time. Or stay lying in this one. The question I have to ask myself, however, is who would miss me if I never resurface again? And also can a young woman drown, out of the blue, in her bath? Is it possible to die from an overdose of serenity in a bubble bath? Would he mourn me? Am I missing out on something?

And then I remember seeing the duck sail past and counting as many ducklings on its trail as I could count up to — four. I know today what I didn’t know back then, that ducks look after each other’s ducklings. Therefore she might have been the mother of the first two, and her friend the mother of the other two.

But I didn’t think like that back then, because I was only two years old, so young, in fact, that my age was still only measured in months. It wasn’t long after I had heard my mother say that I was twenty-two months old. My brother, on the other hand, is six and supposed to mind me, but he is busy doing something else that is more important, fishing for tadpoles. Which is why I’m alone, milling about on the banks of the lake in the city centre in size 23 boots that are, in fact, far too big for me, because they belong to my brother, as do the blue trousers I’m wearing. Then I lie down on my stomach and stretch out my hand to stroke the soft down. I’m so small that, when I watch these yellow ducklings swim past me, we look each other in the eye and they don’t seem at all small to me, although they are perhaps smaller than I am. They embody all of the natural features of my own family: they are tiny like me, soft like my mom and hairy like my dad. I feel a deep empathy for them, even though I won’t know the meaning of such words until many years later. I may be my brother’s sister, but I also don’t feel it is unlikely that I may be one of them. We’re all in the same family, me and the ducks and ducklings. Because I’m a girl I can understand other living beings, identify with them and merge with my surroundings. I’m not separate from this world, nor is this world separate from me; time had not taken hold of me yet and distances are nothing but ripples on the water. That is why I can quack like a duck. It is also why I follow my friends’ trail and step into the depths after them. For an instant I can walk on the muddy green water but then sink just as fast. On the surface of the water I can see the orange feet wriggling in a state of commotion.

It is only when I start to drown and to experience what dying is like for the first time, only when my cloth diaper and trousers have been engulfed by a mass of light green lake sediment, that I realize that I am not a duck, that I belong to another species.

From here on in, I’m on my own and, once more, it is up to me to attract the attention of the boy who is trying to catch tadpoles in his jar; my fate as a woman lies in my brother’s hands.

Even though my age is still only measured in months, it is at that moment that I grasp what lies at the core of the interplay of opposites in the relationship between men and women. Number one: I have to attract the fisherman’s attention; number two: win his admiration; number three: trigger the desired response. As I’m swallowing the gallons of sediment in the lake, knowing perfectly well that it is pointless to try to use the few words I have officially mastered, another key element in human communication springs to mind, and that is the abyss that lies between interest and action, that admiration can, in fact, in some cases, result in a lack of initiative and even inertia. The vain expectations of the other can end in disappointment and ultimately destruction and death. Unthinkable as it may seem today, I knew back then, barely two years old, that I was a woman in the making, a future woman.

“He quacks like a real duck,” says the policeman who finally pulls me out of the water.

The moment he takes me in his arms, green spew gushes out of me, all over him and his colleague.

“He’s swallowed gallons of water, the car will be flooded.”

And it is there, draped over his shoulder like a spineless wimp, that I realize there is a world behind the colourful rooftops of the surrounding wooden houses and that this is where my future lies; that the world is not shapeless chaos, but structured in many layers, like the rings rippling across the surface of the water, and that I am now standing very close to the innermost ring. I had yet to travel far and take many rounds.

“That’s not a boy, it’s a girl,” says his colleague when he takes off my soaking trousers.

He wraps me in a brown woollen blanket before escorting me to the warm inside of the police car. Meanwhile my only brother in the front gets to play with the handcuffs and baton.

I linger there, semi-submerged, feeling little or no pain. I’ve settled all my affairs and am about to take my summer holiday in November, what more could a woman ask for?

It is precisely at that moment, as I’m lying there with my hands planted on my foaming knees protruding from the surface, like two islets somewhere in the southern seas, and trying to think of some way of simplifying my life and making it more accessible — precisely as I’m beginning to feel that I’m finally catching my bearings out there in the open ocean — that the phone rings.

I can’t be bothered to drag my body out of the Caribbean Sea until it rings for the eighth time; only Mom could be that persistent.

“You could have been downstairs in the laundry room, hanging up your washing,” she would say.

It’s not Mom but some man from the Association of the Deaf, who obviously isn’t deaf since he tells me his name and then asks if I am me.

“We have a new policy of directly contacting the winners of our lottery,” he says. For the first time the numbers of the autumn lottery are now traceable to the people who bought them, he explains, since the ticket numbers are made up of a combination of the holders’ social security numbers, phone numbers and car registrations. He is therefore very happy to inform me that I’ve just won the first prize in the Association of the Deaf’s lottery: a ready-made mobile summer bungalow with an American kitchen, deck and grill, that was built by deaf builders and can be taken apart and transported to any part of the country. Could I collect it as soon as possible and in any case no later than the 15th of the month?

I’m on my knees with the receiver in my hand and a trail of water that has followed me down the corridor. The telephone table vanished in the move. It’s quite possible that I have this ticket, since I buy practically every lottery ticket that is offered to me. I do this primarily for three reasons. One: the person standing on my doorstep is blue from the cold. Two: too young to be out alone in the dark. Three: he or she is in difficulty for some reason, either because he or she is blind or deaf, for example, or in a wheelchair outside a store. Then I always forget about the tickets, without ever bothering to check the winning numbers.

The bath water is lukewarm when I climb back into it, but I can’t be bothered adding any hot water, as I try to figure out a possible location for the complete summer bungalow in my new life. Destiny isn’t something to be trifled with; in a single day I’ve lost my home and my neat little past. Instead I’ve been given a new prefabricated cottage which, for a number of obvious reasons, is more suited to a barren patch of Icelandic land or shrubbery than the tropical forests or coral reefs that featured in my future dreams.

Despite my goose bumps, I linger in the bath tub. My happiness is sinking and my body is beginning to re-emerge through the dissolving foam. Mom is right — I’m too skinny.

I see new possibilities opening up before me, new travel plans in my life. Maybe I should explore this island in the winter instead, make the most of the waning light, stretch out these short days, take little strolls away from the car every now and then, into the barren moors, maybe even go all the way east. It’s been seventeen years since I was there last; for some reason or another, my path has never led me back there. Nor have I done much travelling across the island’s mossy lava fields and dunes. I limited myself to two nights of camping a year with my former husband, in a double sleeping bag, in places where he felt he could stretch out by the entrance to the tent, facing the low vegetation with a bottle and cooling disposable grill in front of us, waiting for the snipes to shut up for a while in the summer nights so that we could finally catch some sleep. Thinking about it, I never venture any further from the city than the Gufunes cemetery after the beginning of November. But I can imagine how, after several hundred kilometres of driving, things might automatically start to solve themselves in my mind.

There is nothing to disturb my plans here but my ex, who obviously still has a set of keys, since he sticks his head through the doorway while I’m still marinating in the bath.

“I took a few pots and the wok and the mixer, but left the sandwich toaster behind.”

“OK.”

“See you soon then.”

I see him walk by with the folded Santa Claus suit under his arm. He was a big hit in the role at his office’s Christmas ball last year. “Me, the only childless employee,” he grudgingly remarked as we were driving home that evening.

“They wouldn’t have chosen you otherwise,” was the best answer I could come up with.

“Maybe I could have a quick shower since I’m here,” he says.