Butterflies in November

TWENTY-FIVE

You bid your husband farewell forever with a vigorous handshake and then meet him the next morning buying sesame seed bread rolls in the local bakery, queuing in the bank at lunchtime, swimming in the pool in the afternoon, or at the registry office later in the week, and then, the weekend after that, at the theatre with his new significant other — always inevitably bumping into each other.

We haven’t completely renewed our wardrobes yet. Generally speaking, it’s underwear that people renew first after a divorce, both the person who leaves and the person who is left behind. Of course, I don’t know how far his imagination can stretch and whether it can reach under my clothes, but he can see that my hair has grown over my ears; pretty soon it’ll be longer than his. We’ve indulged ourselves a bit, both the one who left and the one who was left behind. It’s a gross misconception to assume that the one who is left behind doesn’t binge on food any more than the other, eating out in restaurants, savouring an entire fillet of lamb on a Monday, drinking cognac straight out of a bottle and downing half a kilo of vanilla ice cream with hot chocolate sauce, sprinkled with a packet of almond flakes.

While we are queuing in the bank, he examines me for any external signs of change. Even though everything may seem identical on the surface, I am no longer the person he knew and once owned, and pretty soon I’ll be even more different and newer, so new and transformed, in fact, that it may even take me some time to get used to the new me staring back in the mirror. He is looking extremely well, it seems to me, rested, energetic. He’s put on a kilo and a half, by the look of him. I can see now what a good couple we made. We exchange mutual questions about each mother’s health.

“Hi, how’s your mom?”

“Hi, fine, thanks, and how’s your mom?”

“Fine, last I heard. Are you paying bills?”

I can’t tell him that I’m opening two new accounts to deposit my millions and those of my child in care, 22,261,000 krónur each, so I just say:

“No, buying some currency.”

“Are you going on a trip?”

“Yes, you could say that, taking a late summer holiday.”

“Where to?”

I suddenly feel an irrepressible urge to conceal the bungalow from him, the fact that I now have a summer house all to myself, in the same way that he has a woman all to himself. They seem to be of equal value to me at that moment.

In the line in front of me there is a small Asian woman with shiny jet-black hair, holding the hand of a little mixed-race girl.

“South-east Asia probably, Thailand, Burma, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore.”

“Wow, will you be gone long?”

“At least six weeks, maybe longer, six months, maybe longer.”

“Wow. .”

To be able to settle my business in peace, I allow a few people to skip me in the queue until he has left the building, climbed into his car and turned the key in the ignition. He looks tired to me now, stressed. He seems to have lost weight. He has bags under his eyes, as if he weren’t sleeping properly. I see now what a poor match we made.

Cashier no. 4 looks at me with a puzzled air when I place the check on the counter in front of her and ask her to split it, by depositing it into two separate bank accounts: 44,523,622 krónur. Then I ask for two million in cash, preferably in thousand-krónur notes. I see no need to leave a trail. Her colleagues at the neighbouring desks slow down their counting.

“That would be 2,000 thousand-krónur notes,” she says reluctantly, twenty wads.

“Yes,” I say, without bothering to recalculate, “that’s right.”

“Just one moment,” she says, because she has to leave her desk, probably to nip into the coffee room at the back to discuss this with her colleagues, after which she’ll have to nip down to the basement to get the wads of cash from the safe. Four of her co-workers check me out with surreptitious glances during her absence.

“It’s best to keep large amounts of cash in nondescript plastic bags, not in a Gucci handbag at any rate,” says the cashier when she returns. “It’ll draw less attention, a used supermarket bag, for example, or library bag,” she says.

As she passes me the bag stuffed with bills through the hole in the glass, she says:

“The branch manager sends you his regards and apologizes for the breadcrumbs, he kept his lunch in that bag.”