Butterflies in November

THIRTY-TWO

We have breakfast with the family in the kitchen. The male choir is warming up in the dining hall with a light medley of Estonian melodies. I imagine the lyrics must sound quite exotic to other ears than mine. The woman places a bouquet of red tulips on the table in front of me.

“He asked me to send his regards and hopes to see you again soon.”

The tulips obviously grow in the greenhouse between the cucumbers; I should count myself lucky that he didn’t send me an autographed one.

Tumi picks the cucumber rings out of the pâté on his bread. Everyone stares at him, children and parents, as he systematically pulls them off, one by one, and places them on the side of his plate, without showing the slightest interest in his audience.

“He’s the spitting image of you,” says the woman.

“Yeah, definitely a chip off the old block,” says the husband.

“Are you travelling alone?” the woman asks.

“Are you going far?” asks the husband.

At the end of the table there is a boy I’m guessing is about sixteen or seventeen years old, stooped over a bowl of Cheerios. His limbs seem strangely disproportionate, as if each body part had grown separately. He has puffy, sleepy eyes and big ears that his hat doesn’t quite manage to cover. There can no longer be any doubt as to whom the size 44 sneakers in the hall belong to. He obviously gets his looks from his mother, who is a pretty woman with fine features. I gaze at him intently, until he finally looks up with his shimmering aquamarine eyes.

“He grew fourteen centimetres last summer,” his mother tells me, “barely climbed out of bed in July and August, slept eighteen hours a day and just woke up to eat. He’s certainly our prodigal son; we practically had to slaughter a lamb for every meal. He was of little use to us that summer, couldn’t even drive the combine harvester he’s been driving since the age of eight.

“He was so sluggish in his movements that we thought he’d never get from the sofa to his bed; it was as if he was up to his arms in water.”

They talk about their son as if he weren’t there and the young man shows no reaction, focusing all his efforts on fishing cereal out of his milk. His father joins in:

“We were on our way home after a ball; everyone was on the bus, which had its engine running and was about to leave. While some people were staring into the dark or kissing, I hopped out to look for my future wife’s friend, who I’d been flirting with a little. They both had the same ponytail and I had a few drinks in me.”

“We sometimes say that our relationship is based on a case of mistaken ponytails,” the woman interjects with a smile. They laugh and I get the feeling that it’s a story that’s been polished over the years, until it gained its final form.

“Not that he’d ever mistake the tails of two horses.”

“She was throwing up behind a building, it was the first time she ever got hammered, and while I was wiping her face you could say that the wheels of our first-born were set in motion. The best thing of all is that no one on the bus even realized I was absent during those few minutes.”

“Yeah, doesn’t take Stebbi very long,” she says, and they burst into laughter. “We’ve been inseparable ever since,” she adds.

“Yes, you can say that again. I felt I’d reached heaven when I got to know her,” says the husband.

His wife’s dress has a zip at the waist and she wriggles inside it, like an eel in floral slippers.

The man has dropped out of the conversation and is now staring at the shape of the body that fills out the dress. He peers longingly into her eyes as she’s talking, until she finally walks over to him. Could they be completely oblivious to the presence of their morning guests?

Suddenly the door swings open and a little being totters into the room with a bulging diaper swaying behind it, after the night’s sleep. The woman turns away from the man and bends over to embrace the child. She picks her up and kisses her and then passes her to her husband while she leaves the room a moment. An instant later she returns with some buttermilk yogurt in a bowl.

“Sugar,” says the child, clapping her hands.

“One spoon for the emperor in China,” says the woman, “one for Queen Margrethe Thorhild of Denmark, one for King Kristjan the Ninth, who gave us a constitution, one for Ingibjörg, the wife of our national hero Jón Sigurdsson, one for Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, and one for Dorrit Moussaieff.”

“Imagine,” says the woman, as she is saying goodbye to me with the infant in her arms, “some people in this world have never driven in the rain.”

She looks up at the steep hill in her damp sweater. As I’m driving along the back road, it occurs to me that I might have misheard her, that my hearing might be getting worse, and that what she might have actually said was: “Imagine, there are people in this world who’ve never heard the sound of rain.”

And then she pricked up her ears to the sky, her sweater by now drenched.