Butterflies in November

FORTY-ONE

The boy is asleep in the back seat under two down sleeping bags. Unusually, the kitten is awake and restless; maybe it’s carsick or the tuna fish sandwich, which had passed its expiry date, from the hotel didn’t go down too well in its stomach. As for me, I’m quite content with my lot, my glistening new car, the darkness and the heater that is working full blast.

I slip a disc into the brand-new CD player: a pantomime ballet by Béla Bartók, The Miraculous Mandarin. I shove the receipt I’ve folded into eight into the pocket of my flowery trousers.

Apart from the flowery trousers, I mostly dressed as a boy.

“Yes, you were one of the boys,” says Granny. “You cut your hair like them, dressed like them and wore the same chequered brown sweater over your shirt all summer.” I can’t remember whether it was washed in the autumn when I got back to town or thrown away.

In stores I was addressed as a male. There was a constant stream of guests at my gran and grandad’s place. And plenty of room, no matter how much of a squeeze it was. They even lent their own conjugal bed, if the need arose. People weren’t supposed to stay in hotels; that was for foreigners. In August, all the kids from the area would gather, all the children that had been sent to the neighbouring farms in the name of good health and getting in touch with our rural roots, and we would spend the last week of our stay in the east in my granny’s blue house down by the shore. That is where I would pass my time with my cousins, who weren’t necessarily really my cousins, but also the grandchildren of some of Granny’s old friends. No one actually knew exactly how we were supposed to be related to each other. Nevertheless, I called them cousins and they called me cousin too, although most of them were clearly unrelated to me. As the number of people increased in the house, we squeezed in tighter together and moved between bedrooms, as required, or up into the attic, with our synthetic quilts or blankets folded under our arms. Children under the age of fifteen slept without a down quilt. There were often fights for space that stretched long into the night. The main goal was to tightly wrap one’s self in the synthetic duvet without the slightest draught.

I’d promised to get up first in the morning and heat up the cocoa and butter the scones. This meant that I had to stand up in the middle of the mattress and grope my way forward, balancing my arms like a tightrope artist, to avoid stumbling on the crowded mattress and get out of there without stepping on any calves, knees or, worse still, entire bodies.

As soon as I stand up with my hands in the air, I realize that the waistband on my pyjama bottom has snapped and the waist cord has slipped back into the furbelow during the night. I’m wearing nothing underneath because Granny is washing all my clothes. I clutch the waistband in the hope of saving myself any embarrassment and try to avoid waking up my cousins, but then realize that they are both awake and lying stiffly, on either side of the bed, watching my every move with new adult eyes.

I slow down, barely going over forty tonight. The mountain pass road twists and turns. Suddenly there is yet another pile of rubble ahead of us, a landslip that has crumbled from the side of the mountain, which stretches into the sea below. The car skids and adrenaline shoots through my body. There is no mistake about it; a mudslide has fallen onto the road in front of us, forming a pile of stones and sludge. Not a soul in sight and no way of turning back, a sleeping child in the back and a wakeful kitten in the front. There’s a shovel in the trunk, I noticed it when I was packing the car. As soon as I clear away some of those rocks and push all that mud to one side, I should be able to get past. If the kitten and I were to slip, at least I would have someone to hold onto for eternity; but the thought of the fate of my passenger in the back seat is just too overwhelming, the responsibility is paralysing.

I can’t really boast of any clairvoyant powers, but suddenly a man springs out of the darkness and fog — the third man on my road to the east — seemingly materializing out of nowhere. Standing before me, he hurls himself into the beams of my headlights, like the sheep, except that this time the car isn’t moving. He is so real, in fact, that it seems perfectly natural when he grabs the shovel from me and spares me the trouble of having to clear the mud away.

That’s how far a woman’s imagination can take her. His voice is clearly too deep for a man of this world.

“Are you travelling east?” it asks. It’s painfully obvious that I’m heading east, since the road runs from west to east, like a coffin on the floor of a church.

“Could you take me some of the way?” he asks, “I’m stranded here.”

He pulls out a silver flask and offers it to me first, as a token gesture, before taking a sip. As I drive, he tells me tales about country folk, most of them containing some supernatural element, stories of departed souls, guardian spirits, premonitions, shipwrecks. In between stories he praises my driving and tells me that, when he was a boy, he intended to grow up to be something other than what he is today.

“Are you a fisherman?” I ask.

“I don’t practise my casting in the winter or make my own flies, if that’s what you mean. Blood and entrails aren’t really my thing, although I can gut a fish and stuff a bird. They’d probably put me in telecommunications if we were at war, or directing operations from some safe shelter away from headquarters. No, I was just helping a friend of mine who’s cultivating a patch of land up there by the dam. We were planting dwarf apple trees under the cover of night.”

As he’s sitting there beside me, for a brief moment I feel a peculiar familiarity between us, as if he were closely connected to me, and my mind was trying to recall what my body clearly remembered. Once we’ve passed the mudslide, I know what he’s going to say:

“Come with me, I want to show you something,” he says in a very persuasive voice.

I stop the car. The boy is asleep in the back seat and will sleep until dawn. The headlights illuminate a stretch of path through the lava field. The glistening blue pumice squelches under the soles of his hiking boots as he walks. A woman in high heels would have a hard job keeping up with him.

I follow him blindly through the lava field, as naturally as one would follow a clerk to the screw and bolts section of a hardware store, without, however, ever taking my eyes off the car on the side of the road.

He is wearing a red shirt under his coat. The weather has cleared, with puffs of vapour hovering over cavities here and there, and tips of lava rock piercing through the moss. The moon follows us like a balloon, bouncing from the rim of one crater to the next, rebounding against our heels, rolling over the undulating igneous rock and swelling with every change of direction, like the pupil of an eye, with the golden glow of its sclera reflecting on our necks.

Suddenly, the moon vanishes behind a cloud and the world plummets into darkness again.

“I can’t be long, seven minutes at the most; I can’t stay away from the boy for too long.”

“We’re almost there.” He scans the rocks to find a spot where he can relieve himself, since he has been drinking on the way.

We forge on, step by step, with about fifty metres behind us now. I would never have believed that darkness could be this black. It’s as if I were walking across that creaking wooden beam back in my old gym, and were trying to hold my balance at its centre with both arms, the other girls watching me in silence. This is how far a woman’s feelings can lead her.

I can no longer see anything, nothing but the hot vapour of my own breath in front of me. I grope forward, but my hands grasp nothing but a vacuum, the pitch darkness ahead of me is a thick wall that can’t be followed because it delineates nothing, protects nothing, there is no way of distinguishing the outline of the world or its edges, the rugged lava field gives off no scent. Nevertheless I sense there is something extraordinary just a few arm lengths away from us, but what?

“What do you want to show me?”

“This,” he says.

“This what?”

“The darkness.”

“The darkness?”

“Yes, you’re a city girl aren’t you?”

I sense a colossal human construction in the middle of the darkness, and try to conjure up an image in mind. What kind of picture is it, though? A gothic cathedral that suddenly rises to the heavens in some old red-light district abroad, suddenly standing there, sky-high, at the end of a narrow paved road with dark, smelly corners. I’m standing on the edge of the imaginary, on the edge of the fear of darkness. The only thing one can do is grope for another human being. Suddenly I feel it is perfectly natural for him to slip his arm around me and for me to lay my head on his shoulder.

He has started to undress me in the drizzle, with swiftness and skill, ankles and wrists, zippers and tight necklines are no challenge to him. He spends the most time wrestling with my panties, which become entangled in his hands. It’s a little cold, but he throws a coat under me and rolls me over back and forth. A lava bed may seem like an odd mattress, but in his own way this man has created a secure shelter for me, with the heavens above us and the earth below, and the two of us sandwiched in between — could one ask for more security?

Afterwards we linger a moment, sitting in the middle of the lava field. He rests his head on my shoulder and I kiss him, as if he were a child about to doze off. When he stands up he hands me a little stone containing the bright shape of a horseshoe in its centre.

“Next time, it’ll be a silver belt or crock of gold.” He smiles at me.

“I can take care of myself from here on,” he says to me, once we’ve retraced our steps. “But I’ll come looking for you later,” he adds, “you’re the best thing that’s happened to me today by far.”