Butterflies in November

SEVEN

I can’t say that I particularly enjoy cooking, but anyone who can read can cook. That’s all there is to it. You can even browse through recipe books in their original language alone in bed at night. I find a tolerable radio station, have the music quite loud, fetch the bird from the balcony and roll up my sleeves.

I got the soul of every rapper in me, love me or hate me.

A post-pubescent rapper starts to curse his mother. This is the kind of ingratitude you can expect from an offspring.

Fuck your mother.

I’m increasingly starting to feel the enormous benefits of not having a child. Kids of his age have bad skin, you have to book appointments for them at the dermatologist’s half a year in advance, and buy them steroid creams that will only make them more hostile towards you. They grow too fast, just one segment of the body at a time, wake up in foul moods, never open the window and, if they make their beds, they feel like they’ve done enough housework for a whole month. They sit at birthday parties in their anoraks and refuse to take down the blinking Christmas lights that were put up in their rooms, even after Easter has passed, and collect dirty socks under their beds.

I just found out my mom does more dope than I do.

Cooking is educating yourself through reading. I never commit recipes to memory, but conscientiously follow the written instructions, thus managing to produce the most laborious and time-consuming dishes with music in my ears. When I cook lemon chicken with olives it is to the accompaniment of my Khaled Sahra CD, when I make pumpkin soup it’s Pinetop Perkins, for grilled corn on the cob it’s Rubén González, and when I make Osso buco or Baccalà alla livornese it’s Gianmaria Testa. Dvořák or Liszt are in my ears when I make Diós palacsinta pancakes with a nut filling and, even though I’m not a big Strauss fan, I put up with him when I make Pustertaler Kassuppe. When it comes to Icelandic meat soup, it’s got to be something out of the Bjarni Thorsteinsson collection and with Borsch or Moscow beetroot soup it has to be Prokofiev’s orchestral suites. It may not be particularly original, but I’m not the first person in the world to make meat-stuffed cabbage rolls.

If anyone asks me how I did it, I answer: I looked up goose in the index, read the recipe and followed it. It even had photos of secure, well-manicured male hands demonstrating the whole procedure, step by step. There is no connection between culinary talents and other talents in life. People don’t need to, for example, be child-friendly or of a particularly benevolent nature to be able to cook good food.

I’ve just plonked the bird on the draining board when the doorbell rings. It’s my neighbour from downstairs with a cat in her arms.

“I know how you feel,” she says, “that makes two divorcees in the building now.”

I ask her how she heard the news, since I’ve barely heard it myself and I haven’t told anyone about it.

“I’ve known about it since the spring,” she says, fondling her cat, stroking and scratching it all over so that its fur soon looks like it has been blasted by a hairdryer.

“It’s a good job it’s out in the open now,” she says, holding out her empty sherry glass to me for the fourth time.

“Apart from anything else, she’s pretty plain-looking. So what if men find her beautiful?”

The liquid level of the bottle has dropped considerably by the time she takes her leave and I can fully devote myself to the bird on the draining board again. You obviously need to start at the right end, the book says, and to pluck the bird’s feathers from the outer layer in. How are you supposed to do that? I call Mom, who tells me she was just about to call me, had the phone in her hand, because she has just found my old skates.

“They’ll be as good as new,” she says, “once I’ve finished polishing them.”

As for the plucking of the goose, her conclusion is that the method used is just a matter of personal taste, feather by feather or by the handful, it all comes to the same, the main thing is to ensure that once it has been plucked its skin has a greyish-blue colour, with a pretty diamond pattern. Then run a blowtorch over the rest, the remaining down, to make it presentable. Mom sends her regards to Thorsteinn.

“I got him to move a cupboard for me the other day and he seems to have lost weight lately,” she says as she hangs up.

I can’t say she’s wrong and hang up too.

Naked there on the draining board, the bird reveals its vulnerable nature more than ever before. Because I don’t have any proper tools, like a welding or a primus blowtorch, I assemble my entire collection of candlesticks, aligning and lighting all the candles on the table — gilded, red, tea light and scented candles — and start the operation.

The butterfly doesn’t stir on the wall, not even as the match approaches, not a single twitch, its wings still calmly folded.

I could also surprise him and invite some other people. I draw up a guest list in my mind. I randomly include two of his colleagues from work, who on second thought, however, wouldn’t really be appropriate for this occasion, a female equestrian friend of his and a Middle East expert, who happens to be a childhood friend of mine, then another one of his acquaintances, an actress, who is currently between men, and my trusted friend, Auður, a pianist. Neither of the widows, i.e. neither my mother nor his, since this isn’t a bonding exercise, but a last supper, at which both women would only be backing and defending their thirty-something offspring.

The neck dangles over the table. This is no ordinary goose, having been felled in this very special manner, slightly maimed perhaps, certainly with a dislocated shoulder, but not blatantly battered, or at least no worse than if it had been machine-gunned with pellets. You won’t lose any fillings eating this bird, there is no lead in this flesh, which will be exceptionally tender, since it didn’t have to flee a vast distance from snipers, felt no adrenaline rush when I hit the brakes, couldn’t have known what was coming.

Whatever is lacking can be compensated for by the stuffing, good stuffing can always save you, nice and spicy, so long as you don’t go over the top, something few men understand. I don’t go over the limit, although I may come pretty close to it. I’m hardly going to poison my husband, turn an unborn child into an orphan, am I? No, a child needs a father, a boy needs a dad.

The doctor laughed. No father, eh? So it happened all by itself, did it? Just like the Virgin Mary in the olden days? You’re such a smart girl, you’ll turn into an incredibly attractive woman given a few years. If you could only stay still a moment, instead of wriggling like a worm all the time.

It’s at this moment, however, that I ask myself: does my husband have good taste when it comes to flesh? Was it a man of taste who chose me?

One of the principal advantages of being married to a man who is often abroad on business is that there’s always plenty of booze in the wine cupboard to fix a slightly dodgy dish or save a sauce, liqueur aperitifs to blunt the guests’ sense of judgement and boost the confidence of the chef, although I probably shouldn’t drink too many more glasses of this yellow lemony liquid.

The goose has not been hung for long enough, that’s clear. I scan its skin in search of any brown blotches that might indicate the animal had been ill. Not that it could actually kill either of us — at worst give us a nasty stomach bug.

On second thoughts, it’s probably best to cut the breasts off and make a thick, creamy wild sauce to camouflage the tread marks of the tires. But later, when he scrapes the sauce slightly off the bare meat, he is bound to see the imprint of the wheels, like finding the hidden almond in the Christmas rice pudding. Then I’ll grab his attention and get him to look up, not necessarily into my eyes, and I’ll say:

“Well then, Happy New Year in advance and thanks for the four years of marriage, plus the 285 days and seven hours.”

I finally break her open and rip out her bleeding heart, surprised by the appearance of the creature’s innermost entrails. The heart is so small it would fit into the palm of the hand of a newborn child.

I kiss the small bleeding palm and his hand, smearing my lips in red. That’s what my classmate Bergsveinn was like in the eighth grade, with blood-red lips. I, on the other hand, had long brown hair with bangs. Our religion teacher once told him that he had kissable lips. Bergsveinn blushed, increasing the blood flow to his lips even more. But the religion teacher was a married man, so it was clear that he was teasing him for the sake of us girls in the class. After that, all we girls in the class learnt that not all lips are equally suited to all tasks. This is how a woman can suddenly learn what she can expect from life.

Detach the tiny fingers protruding from the heart, by pulling them out one by one, like a midwife retrieving the bloody newborn child from the arms of a fifteen-year-old girl to deliver it for adoption. There is no way of discerning from the cry, as it is being carried away, whether it is a boy or a girl. Some say the cry of a boy is more delicate, fragile and feeble than the cry of a girl, boys who have no natural fluff on their heads and wear light blue hoods. He, however, has a big mass of dark hair. The woman is from the east of the country, not very young. I only catch a brief glimpse of her and say nothing, buried under the pillow. I’m not sure the crying can be heard for long because the corridor stretches far away, the coffee percolator is brewing and the singing of the plover that has recently returned from the southern hemisphere can be heard through the window. Because it is spring, one can smell the perfume of the woman who is driven away with the baby in the car. She is sitting in the back with the child enveloped in a small down quilt, her husband alone in the front.

I could, of course, delve into all kinds of regional variations of chicken, pigeon or duck recipes, marinated goose, sautéed in butter and sprinkled with ground pepper and thyme or roasted very slowly for a long time in the oven, while I nip off for a swim and steam bath in the meantime and pop into the bookshop to see if my order has arrived. I also consider following an Irish recipe, which consists in letting the bird simmer in a pot for four hours with onion and stuffing, while the evidence erodes away, and then fry it. The solution comes to me in a flash; I try to merge several recipes, mixing unrelated flavours in an unexpected way.

In fact, the major challenge and biggest obstacle I have to face in any of my cooking is the cutting of the onion. My vulnerability to the onion isn’t comparable to my vulnerability to any other aspect of my life. It is standing unpeeled on the table and I’ve already started to cry. I take off my wedding ring and place it at the top of the draining board, behind the bird’s gutted entrails. I brandish a knife and my eyes immediately well with tears. I can’t see a thing, but nevertheless blindly stick to the task at hand, groping for the second onion and then the third and have ceased being able to see the book ages ago. I fumble and zigzag into the dining room, searching for the balcony door where the chives are still steadily growing in their pot, even though we’re in October.

“You’re far too sensitive for this world,” my neighbour from downstairs said to me once, when she saw my violent reaction to onions one day as I was staggering outside to try to focus on the world again. These are the kind of things women say to other women. Even women who sleep with your husbands. After some time they phone you and say: “He isn’t exactly the way I thought he’d be, sorry,” and they even want to meet up with you in a café and form a book club.