Butterflies in November

FIFTY-FOUR

“You’re incredibly unlucky,” the doctor tells me, “it’s almost incomprehensible. You seem to have jumped to the side and somehow managed to do the impossible, to bang your hand against the edge of the Guðfinna Kristjánsdóttir capelin ship.”

He looks like a doctor out of a novel, a handsome man who inspires confidence. He has small hands, though, hands are rarely mentioned in books that feature doctors.

“We’ve gone over all the security measures and couldn’t find any faults there. Eleven people jumped off ahead of you, no side winds or anything like that, you don’t have any suicidal tendencies, do you? Luckily, it was the contraction of the elastic that saved you and made you bounce back up when you landed; the radius of your right wrist is broken, you got off quite lightly, all things considered.”

Then I suddenly remember:

“Where’s the boy?”

“Your son’s in the other room. He’s doing a jigsaw.”

They usher him into the room of the health centre and position him at the end of the bed, from where he looks at me with anxious eyes.

How irresponsible of me, my son was on the point of becoming an orphan.

Once we’ve embraced each other as much as circumstances will allow, the boy opens his mouth to the doctor and points at a tooth. It’s loose.

“He’s a bit young to be losing a tooth,” says the doctor, “but it does happen.” The boy closes his mouth. Then the doctor turns back to me.

“How are you feeling?”

“Fine.”

“Don’t you remember me?”

That’s what they all say, it’s hardly very original. This is the third time in about as many days that I’m being asked this unfathomable question.

“No, should I?”

“We were at secondary school together and left at the same time. I often looked at you, without ever hitting on you. You were a bit too boyish-looking for my taste — but I remember your special linguistic talents and how you spoke all these exotic languages, even ones that weren’t being taught at the school.”

I remember him now. He immediately had a girlfriend. They sat in the corner and held hands, in a world of their own, and didn’t show up at parties. They’re still together, in fact, because she now appears from behind him to wrap a blood pressure cuff around my arm. He does the introductions for both of them:

“Don’t you remember Gugga? She went on to do nursing.” She greets me with professional detachment, without being distracted from her task.

A woman enters and places a tray of food in front of me on the bed. She offers Tumi some too, but he shakes his head. I’m not hungry, but am used to doing what I’m told. I manage to eat almost half of the sausage and a bit of the white sauce with my good hand before I throw up.

It is then that I get a shot of pain through the left side of my chest: my heart skips a beat and I feel as if it had just been clutched by a hand. For a moment it stops to beat, while it waits to see if the hand will squeeze it. I’m finding it difficult to breathe.

I tell them my heart hurts.

“You need to work out what you want. It was a warning. Why did you jump?”

“What do you mean?”

“That horse meat sausage was a test of your free will,” my doctor says, looking at his nurse. I sense they belong to the same world, that there’s a strong personal bond between them.

“Wasn’t that veal meat sausage?”

“No, horse meat, but it all comes down to the same thing, it obviously didn’t agree with you.” Once more the doctor and nurse exchange meaningful glances.

“Isn’t this just what all the patients get?”

“What do you enjoy doing?”

He talks to me as if I were a four-year-old, without taking his eyes off his wife. I answer like a fully grown woman:

“I enjoy being with my son and jogging,” I say, looking at my fingers protruding from the virgin-white plaster. “And I also like to go skating,” I add. I don’t feel it is appropriate to add anything else.

“That’ll be good for you when the weather picks up,” he says.

When we step out of the health centre, I see that my sign language teacher is waiting for us in his heated car.