Butterflies in November

FORTY-SEVEN

Darkness looms over the pool and butter-coloured vapours dissolve into the sombre misty November sky above, as faces vanish and materialize, the diving board only half visible in the haze.

The best way to establish any real intimacy with the inhabitants of this village is in the hot tub, the best way to meet one’s fellow man is in this natural primeval state, where each person is as vulnerable as the next. Huddled together in a tight jacuzzi with my knees pressed against my chest, I can feel the burning warmth of strangers’ bodies in the sulphurous mist. This is pretty much the state God created me in thirty-three years ago, if one adds the swimsuit, sexual longings, life experience and obsessive memories.

People have just got off work and are tired. The summer colours have been drained from their bodies, and they’ve grown all pale and flabby again. Everyone reeks of the same blend of chlorine, this is about as equal as people can get. Most of them are with packs of small children who putter about in the baby pool, mostly unsupervised. The majority of the infants, who wear diapers on dry land, have clearly learnt how to float a good while ago. Next summer they plan to enlarge the pool and build a slide for the children and their fathers.

As Tumi is putting on his new swimming trunks under the shower, he says he wants to be like me. Be like me, I get that much.

“What do you mean like me?”

I think he says woman.

I slip two armbands onto him to make sure he always returns to the surface.

“I want you to stay put right here,” I say, trying to improvise the appropriate sign language with my hands.

“Stay put, only play in the splashing pool.”

He jumps up and down into the shallowest part of the pool, releasing all kinds of joyous shrieks, which he himself can’t hear. He is utterly transformed without his glasses and hearing aids, and looks even smaller and skinnier. His facial features seem to lose the sharpness his spectacle frames give them and blur into each other. I remind myself to pop into a store on the way home to buy some protein powder to stir into his cocoa.

I’ve never seen him this lively. He spatters and splashes and makes the jet of the fountain arch over the other children, who huddle together at the other end, following his moves with mute gaping mouths, wondering whether they should get their own back by pushing him under the surface or emptying a bucket of water over his head. At any rate, this seems to be the only kind of communication Tumi is interested in.

I’m taken aback by the number of tattoos in the tubs, both on the women and men. Virtually all the women have intricate motifs around their arms, and many of the men sport tattooed outlines of reindeer horns in the same area. There were also plenty of tattoos in the swimming pool on the other side of the sand desert, 150 kilometres from here, but the patterns are different over there, mainly of animals and roses.

“If we’re heading for a reversal of the poles,” says a man in the tub, “we’ll have to refigure what’s north and what’s south again, compasses won’t be reliable any more.”

“I can bring you the recipe tomorrow, if you like,” says another woman. “Instead of using ordinary crème fraîche, you can use bacon flavouring.”

“You’ll never have any fun in this life, if you’re never willing to try something new,” an elderly man interjects.

“But you don’t necessarily always have fun, just because you’re trying something new,” chips in another woman.

“No, I’m not saying that one always has to be trying something new,” says the man.

“But it’s also true that you’ll never see anything new if you never go anywhere,” says the woman.

“Exactly, one has to go somewhere to see something new,” says the man.

“Yes, to meet new kindred spirits,” says the woman.

“Exactly.”

As I shift towards the massaging jet of the jacuzzi, I accidentally brush against the hairs of a man’s thighs. This earns me a stern look from one of the ladies; she’s not happy. I’m on the point of telling her that I didn’t do it on purpose.

There are clearly several specimens of the opposite sex in here. Not that I’m shopping for men. It’s not as if I were eyeing them, in search of potential candidates, as that woman’s censorious glare seemed to imply. It’s not as if I’m looking for anything special in this village. All I want is a break and a change. To take a long-overdue summer holiday in November.

The furthest I go is to loosely compare the men in my direct line of vision in the tub with my ex-husband, but only very roughly, glancing at their outlines. He’s starting to fade. I really have to concentrate to summon him up in my mind.

There must have been problems interpreting the sign in the locker room that says in five languages that all patrons are required to shower nude before entering the pool, because five explosive experts from the dam construction site have just appeared at the edge of the pool, stark naked. The lifeguard chases them vigorously with his whistle as they climb the ladder in a single file to the diving board. This brings the conversation in the tub to an abrupt halt, as all eyes turn to the men’s fronts and behinds.

“They need to have that sign in forty languages, since they’ve started work on that dam,” says a woman wearily. She’s no longer staring at me.

I close my eyes.

When I open them again, a new crowd has entered the tub.

Another man is sitting opposite me in the mist. I glance at him, unable to distinguish his face, and have to squint through my wet lock of hair for some time before I realize that it’s him again — the man from the landslide. The elf looks back at me with a teasing air, as if he’d been waiting for me to discover him and manifest my surprise. He seems a bit tense, though, slightly awkward, even a bit shy perhaps. I smile at him and shift, as a fresh jet of hot water spurts out from a pipe on the wall.

He returns the smile, but then starts talking to a woman who has been waiting for the opportunity to say something important to him. I close my eyes again and stretch back in the water, allowing my head to rest on the edge of the tub. I’m beginning to be able to picture myself living in this dark place, even if the mountain road is impassable and nothing seems to happen here.

The woman who was talking to him has stepped out of the tub, leaving only six of us behind.

“I was hoping you two would visit me,” he says finally. “I would have cooked something nice for us, I rarely feel like cooking just for myself.”

He has a peculiar round tattoo on his shoulder which looks a bit like a labyrinth, but could also be a spider’s web.

Apart from our conversation, a highlands silence has fallen on the tub, people have stopped exchanging recipes. He sidles up to me and we sit together, side by side. The others have shifted and withdrawn to the other side, as far as they can from us in this circular tub, and the four of them, two men and two women, sit there mutely, trying to remain as inconspicuous as they can, by veiling themselves in the mist and sinking into the water up to their chins. The steps are on our side of the tub and no one has the courage to draw attention to themselves by climbing out at such a delicate point in our conversation. He floods me with options:

“Anyway,” he continues, “I’d be willing to see you again. We could find things to do.”

Then, leaning forward, as if he were about to climb out of the tub, he stoops over me:

“My private tuition offer still stands,” he says, gently brushing against my shoulder.

He stands up and water pours off his body. The others quickly follow his example and exit after him, like a mass walkout at a trade union assembly. The water level drops considerably and I’m left there, sitting alone.

I suddenly catch a glimpse of a woman in the corner of my eye who seems familiar to me as she rises from the depths of the pool, swimming towards me.

It was on the same evening I’d taken the flower out of my hair, but kept my curly locks. It was Holy Thursday and all the shops were closed. I combed out my curly locks as best I could and tied my ponytail in a yellow band. I was wearing a new jacket and everything was new and strange in my head and I wanted to get away. But instead I went for a swim with my best female friend. My hair was much heavier than normal and stuck together. It was like carrying a new living organ on my back that I couldn’t free myself of. It must have been the hairspray or stuff that had been mixed into it out of so many bottles.

I hear the sound of someone diving close by and the ripples of water travelling all the way over to me. Someone swims below the surface to the bottom at the deep end of the pool. I suddenly feel a wave breaking against my thighs and a hand grabbing my leg and pulling me down. Then my other leg is tugged and I sink and feel the need to cough.

I shoot up and try to cough, but my friend is still holding my leg and tugs it away from the edge again, laughing. I try to break free and kick her, but she obviously feels it’s all part of the game and tightens her grip. I swallow more chlorinated water and feel it freely invading my lungs. My vision begins to blur; I’m losing the game, without ever having travelled abroad. My friend still doesn’t get it when I suddenly free myself and manage to grab onto the edge of the pool. I cough and cough, tears streaming down my cheeks, and try to spit the blood-tinted slime into the side gutter, but miss, and see how it spews out of me and floats straight towards my smiling friend.

When we got home she insisted on reading my fortune so I pulled a few cards out of the deck and placed them on the table. She reckoned I would be about thirty-three years old, but made no mention of a man or children. I was thirteen back then so it seemed like a reasonably ripe age, since I didn’t know that her granny had just spoken about the death of a thirty-three-year-old woman and my friend probably just wanted to sound like a credible fortune-teller.