Butterflies in November

TWENTY-TWO

I take the boy out of his shoes. He seems content and, in almost no time at all, finds two hiding places in the minute apartment, one in the shower and one inside the cupboard. His focus immediately shifts to the boxes and I give him a signal to let him know he’s welcome to take a look inside. Then he suddenly appears in front of me, clutching with both hands a glass of water that is full to the brim, and puts it down on the table. He vacillates and strokes his earlobe before sliding his hand up the sleeve of my sweater, searching for my elbow, and finally caressing my hair with the palm of his little hand. Vanishing for a moment, he swiftly returns with a comb and pair of scissors, standing motionless in front of me with a questioning air. I understand this much.

“You can comb my hair,” I say, “but not cut it. I’m letting it grow.”

So far our communication has greatly exceeded all expectations. I sense a growing communion and understanding between us. Strictly speaking, a woman with a child requires no other company.

After watching The Lion King one and a half times, I place him on the couch, which I can’t be bothered to pull out into a double bed. We share the same quilt. He chews on a corner of the pillow and sucks on the duvet cover. Once he has fallen asleep, I leave the room to double-lock the front door to ensure he doesn’t escape on me. The books from the boxes have been stacked into tall twin towers on the floor.

It’s raining and windy. A window someone seems to have forgotten to shut is banging somewhere. It occurs to me that the owner might be off working on a night shift. My balcony, which under normal circumstances can just about hold a kitchen stool and a book, is inundated. The drainpipe is cluttered and the electricity flickers. It’s a huge responsibility, being with a child. After checking that he is still asleep, I slip outside to try to free the balcony of some of the slush and ice to prevent my temporary home from flooding. A woman armed with a dustpan is attempting a similar kind of operation in a building across the way. On every floor, in fact, some sleepless woman seems to be wrestling against the elements and potential flooding.

The child is restless and kicks the duvet off every time I try to tuck him in. I’m worried he’ll catch cold, which is why I stay awake and pace the floor, monitoring his sleep. His breathing is making me anxious; it seems to have slowed down, abnormally, as if he were holding his breath or simply not breathing at all. I gauge his breathing in relation to the normal rhythm of my own, there’s no comparison. But then, just as I’m about to intervene, the boy suddenly sucks in a very deep breath and his chest begins to heave. I gently pull the duvet back, ever so slightly, to be able to follow the contractions of my protégé’s ribcage, although I can detect no breathing from his nostrils and mouth. It takes me half the night to become acquainted with the child’s breathing patterns, until I finally fall asleep with a cushion and chequered woollen blanket on the floor.

When I wake up again I feel I only dozed off for a moment, but the dark morning has dawned outside and I’m still in charge of this unrelated child. I get up and brush my teeth, without turning on the light, and unscrew the tap under the shower. Finally, I fetch the sleeping child and pull him out of his pyjamas. He shivers, naked on the cold floor, even after I swiftly throw my sweater over him. Then I take the pale child under the shower with me and soap him from head to toe. After some initial protest, he soon wakes up and starts to stamp his feet in the water, clapping his hand. Then I lift him onto the stool and wipe the mist off the mirror so that he can see me parting and combing his hair. Water trickles down my throat. I clearly know nothing about kids, but try to execute the task I’ve been entrusted with as efficiently as possible. It’s the same with my mother and cats. Being allergic to them, you couldn’t exactly call her cat-friendly, but she’d never be bad to one, and always pats and strokes the ones that happen to rub up against her and serves them creamy milk on the doorstep.

“He seemed to be in such a bad way, poor thing,” she would say, plucking off the cat’s hairs.

Abandoning his wet towel on the floor, I fetch his clothes and draw the sign of the Cross over him, even though I’d never try to invoke a divine blessing of this kind on myself. After rubbing cream into him, I dab the back of his ears with a drop from the bottle of male cologne that has been left in my possession. Then I dress him in stockings and a sweater and sit him in front of me in the narrow corner of the kitchen.

Winter mornings are dark and silent. The weather has grown calmer, as if a kind of numbness had descended on mankind, bringing all activity to a halt, after the sharp depression that had swept its way across the island, as if everyone had fallen under some sleeping beauty spell. I make some porridge and coffee. The boy is shoving the fourth spoonful into his mouth when he points at the clock above the fridge, showing me four fingers with his left hand and then three with his right hand and then one with his left hand again. Finally, he holds up both thumbs and vigorously shakes his head towards the clock. There are no two ways about it: the kitchen clock reads four zero seven and it is still indisputably night outside.

I take him under the duvet with me in his stockings. There is no point lying there awake, so I turn on the TV and slip the DVD into the machine. The lottery ticket is in the same bag as the disc. Sometime later, I freeze the drama in mid-action, precisely at the point when the heroine is about to slash her wrists with a razor blade on the edge of the bathtub, because it occurs to me to dial the number on the back of the lottery ticket. I get an answering machine.

“Only one person got all the numbers right and is therefore entitled to the full undivided prize,” chirps an air hostess voice at the other end of the line, “44,000,523 krónur.” I draw a circle around the third row of numbers on my ticket and redial. I get the same voice as before and the same numbers. I feel an urge to check that all the slush has disappeared from the balcony, to tidy up the kitchen, drink a glass of milk, see if any lights have come on in the surrounding houses and finally settle down to watch the end of the DVD. This time the person, who bought the ticket just five minutes before closing time and hit the biggest jackpot in the history of the Icelandic lottery, isn’t some father of five on disability benefit who’d gone bankrupt after underwriting a loan taken out by his ex-brother-in-law, nor is it some good-hearted old granny from Selfoss with eleven grandchildren, who are mostly just starting off on their own in life and need a helping hand, but instead it is a relatively young woman who will be pocketing the whole prize — she and her fellow in good fortune, a deaf four-year-old clairvoyant boy with poor eyesight and one leg three centimetres shorter than the other, which makes him limp when he is only wearing his socks. One can’t really say that this woman is hard off in the strictest sense of the term, even though she has just become single again, nor that she particularly needed to win a prize of this kind.

Looking purely at the laws of probability, it can be assumed that, since it is possible to be unlucky twice in a row, it must be possible to be lucky twice in a row as well. Bad luck can trigger a chain of bad luck in the same way that good luck can trigger good luck, luck brings luck.

“The chances of a woman, who masters eleven languages, several of which are Slavonic, winning two lotteries simultaneously are nevertheless pretty remote,” says my friend Auður, and about as likely as you meeting an elf on a rockslide on the national Ring Road. But, she adds, under certain circumstances and for the chosen few, a remote possibility can become a concrete reality.