Butterflies in November

THIRTY-FOUR

The road suddenly narrows, the pavement ends and gravel takes over. Visibility is down to about three metres through the windscreen wipers and movie songs are being played on the radio before the death notices and commercials. I pump up the volume when a woman starts to sing about suffering and love. Piensa en mi cuando sufras, think of me when you suffer.

There is a river behind us and another one ahead; that makes two single-lane bridges and, as if it were possible, the road is growing even narrower. The number of holes multiplies and cavities deepen. The road meanders on, with a slope and curve ahead of us. Fully focused, I navigate my way between road signs, first warning me of a blind rise and curve ahead and then of a single-lane bridge — that’s National Highway One for you.

As far as I can make out, there is no one else out on this Tuesday morning, apart from the sheep, of course. Normally, by this time of the year, the sheep would all already be indoors, being fed on fodder, but because the weather has been so unusually mild they’re still rubbing up against the sides of the roads and bridge posts. Sometimes they stand in the middle of the road and stare into the headlights of approaching cars with their bloodshot eyes, looking straight at you without so much as flinching. Family clusters usually spread themselves on either side of the road, with the mother and granny sheep on one side and the smaller ones on the other. But when a car approaches they feel an irresistible urge to reunite, and leap off tussocks, the edges of bridges or other hiding places like foreign soldiers, armed to the teeth, waiting to ambush women and children on their way home from church or the bakery. The same pattern repeats itself forty times a day: sheep dash across the road and I screech to a halt. Then, on the forty-first time, the inevitable happens: the animal catches me off guard, appears out of nowhere in the fog and is hurled up against the hood of the car.

When I brake, the animal slides off the hood onto the road, into the mud. The windscreen cracks into thin threads, spreading like crocheted lacework or a spider’s web, spun by a woman. And then shatters. The windscreen wipers continue to swing to and fro, and the small church, which was only glued to the dashboard with craft glue, stands intact.

It is precisely at that moment that it first dawns on me that I am a woman caught in a finely interwoven pattern of feelings and time, that there are many things going on simultaneously that have a significance to my life, that events don’t just simply occur in a linear sequence, but on several planes of thought, dreams and feelings at the same time, that there is a moment at the heart of every moment. It is only much later that a thread through the turmoil that has occurred will emerge. It is precisely in this manner that the destinies of a woman and a beast can intersect. The woman is listening to a Spanish love lament and glances through the rear-view mirror to see how her deaf travelling companion is dealing with his chocolate milk and banana when, at that very same moment, a sheep decides to step onto the road in front of the car, or suddenly panics — how should I know what goes through the mind of a thoroughbred Icelandic sheep? Time is a movie in slow motion.

Maybe I’m ten minutes behind schedule because I lingered under the shower for too long or maybe I’m ten minutes ahead? In any case, if it hadn’t occurred to me to take a summer vacation in November, if I hadn’t won a prefabricated summer bungalow in the Deaf Association’s lottery, if I hadn’t met my ex at the time I did, if I hadn’t been sent east into the country every summer until I was fourteen years old, and if I hadn’t had cultured milk with my muesli for breakfast, I wouldn’t be here right now, but somewhere else, I’d be someone else. I’d probably still be on my leather sofa in the old living room, sitting beside my ex, watching a live war somewhere in the world on TV. That precise moment in time—17:11—at which I ran over that sheep on the Ring Road is intrinsically linked to my entire existence, the incidents, decisions I’ve made, my taste in food, sleeping habits. Because it’s impossible to say many words at once, things seem to happen one after another, events get divided into categories of words, which take on the form of horizontal lines in my narrative when I phone Auður to tell her the news. In practice, though, the connection between words and incidents is of a completely different nature. I don’t say any of this to her over the phone, however. She’s got enough to deal with as it is. No, no one was hurt, except for the sheep that is, who is no longer of this world. Yes, it’s true what she’s saying: at least I slaughtered the sheep faster than the nomadic shepherds in Siberia do; they shove their arm into the beast and grope inside it until they find its aorta and rip it out. Moreover, it’s a skill that commands respect. She’s worried about Tumi — but not because he is in my care — and worried about me, worried about her mom and worried about her unborn children, the health system, her students, and the bad roads on the island, worried about the wars and greed of the world, worried that she’s not allowed to play the accordion — her only outlet in all this waiting — in the bed of the room she shares with four women. Instead, she’s forced to listen to the Bible on tapes. In fact, she’d reached the Book of Job 14:7 when I call.

“So I’m getting my fair share of suffering here,” she says.

I scan the horizon, not a car in sight; the road is deserted, the whole area is deserted, the island seems uninhabited. It figures; I’m driving through a constituency that distinguished itself in the last local elections for its exceptionally good turnout at the polls. Ninety-seven per cent of the electorate, both men and women, voted, that is to say thirty-three individuals. I picked up that tidbit from the local newspaper.

I leap out of the car and first check the trunk. It’s full, so I drag the beast into the passenger seat. It’s a lot heavier than the child. The boy has thrown up and his vomit is quivering on the dashboard. The whole car is in a mess, might as well sell it and buy a new one, as soon as I get a chance.

Black with white rings around its eyes, it makes an odd-looking sheep. It almost looks like a unicorn, since it only has one fully formed horn and the other is little more than a stump. Her extended family bleats in protest before dispersing in the November rain. The bloody carcass rattles in the passenger seat, but I have no choice but to drive it to the next farm, and slip a CD into the player: O mio babbino caro, an aria by Puccini. It’s getting dark again. I open two gates and drive towards a cluster of houses at the foot of the mountain, with wet soiled fingers.

I’m seven years old and my friend Sigurður knocks on the door to tell me that Brandur has been run over, that he’s dead in a cardboard box under the apples in the locked guest toilet and that it will cost me five krónur to see him through the window. I join the queue with five krónur in my hand. The line shortens and I’m wearing new plimsolls because the first day of summer was two days ago. It’s my turn now. I hand Sigurður the coin and climb onto the wooden box outside the window of the guest toilet, where Brandur lies dead. Standing on the tip of my toes in my new plimsolls, it only takes me a second to spot him lying on one side. There’s white froth in his mouth and blood on his stomach. His eyes are open. I bless him with the sign of the Cross in the same way that I’m blessed when I get into a vest after a bath. It’s then that I notice white socks soaking in the sink. When I get down off the box, my friend Sigurður offers me a piece of Wrigley’s spearmint gum. Afterwards, I run into the field by the new building in my new plimsolls. There are puddles of red water, which smell of rust and must, and immediately colour my shoes. That night I soak my white shoe laces in chlorine.

The weather has cleared when we step into the yard and I notice Christmas lights hanging on the ridge of the barn. The family dog hops on me, but no one answers when I knock on the door. The light blue light of a television set glows in the living room of the bungalow so I knock on the window. A couple inside sit at both extremities of a sofa watching a swaggering police Alsatian in an Austrian cop series.

The farmer finally comes to the door with a smile that exposes his red gums.

“That earmark is not mine, it’s my brother’s, who lives on the next farm; let him tend to his own flock. My brother and I haven’t spoken to each other for seven years. A dispute over borders. They’ve recently sent us another threatening letter, just because of the drainage ditches we dug. Now all of a sudden they think they’ve become the spokesmen for wader birds.” Kinship is fatal.