“But doesn’t he miss his mommy?”
“Probably, but he also wants to see what the world looks like, he wants to visit ruins.”
“Are you taking the child to some Arabic country?”
“No, he wants to see the ruins of castles and temples and churches, we’re reading some guidebooks at the moment. He wants to see a pear tree, giraffes and golden sand. I can teach him a few things. He’s started to read and he knows how to make Icelandic pancakes.”
“And to embroider and knit?”
“Yeah, that too.”
She sounds happy to hear me and there’s a new softness in her voice. She speaks in a low tone with plenty of gaps between her words as she continues:
“I think that relationship was a bit rash. He’s not a bad man, but he’s not the man for you.” She no longer refers to Thorsteinn by name.
There’s a silence.
“Well then, Mom, I think I’ll say goodbye then.”
Another silence.
“Provided you have no objections, I was thinking of leaving some money to charity when I’m gone. I was reading about a school in Bosnia for women badly affected by the war. Of course, you don’t read the papers?”
“No, I have no objections.”
“No, I didn’t think you would. You’ll survive, never expected anything less of you. Your brother is the same; he says he has enough too. The triplets just started kindergarten the other day.”
“Well then, Mum, we have to tidy up here now. Tumi has just finished knitting socks for his sisters, so we’ve got to deliver them. We should be in town by tomorrow evening, barring any mishaps.”
She suddenly remembers some good news:
“You’ll never believe this, some light green shoots have grown out of that plant of yours that I thought was made of silk.”
“Right then, Mom, we’ll say goodbye for now.”
“I won’t decorate the tree until you’ve arrived then.”
SIXTY-THREE
This is how the darkest day of the year begins: a new light has filtered through the pallid, rainy sky of the past weeks, and a cloud resembling a crown has formed.
“Like a tooth,” says the boy pointing at his gaping mouth.
It must be a sign to herald in the wonderful beginning of the shortest day of the year. Just before noon, the heavens raise their black blanket and the sun horizontally pierces through the window in a narrow pink streak, like the thin line between the drooping eyelids of a sleeping woman. I contemplate myself and the home in the reflection of the window. The Christmas gifts from the co-op are ready and wrapped on the table, and the cards have been decorated and adorned with glitter. Little overlapping handprints are visible on the window, a slew of sticky fingers stamped on the glass. Soon, everything will revert back to normal again: snow drifts, ice, closed mountain roads — once more the country will be as white and odourless as it should be. We sit out on the deck with hot chocolate and our faces tilted towards the first ray of sunshine in two months.
There is actually no need to drive around the whole country, half a circle is more than plenty.
“Three men,” says the boy.
“Three men what?”
“Around the table.”
He points at a drawing he is completing. In the middle of the table there is a woman who clearly has green eyes and short dark hair.
“My hair has grown,” I laugh, I’ve changed. Now I look at the world through long bangs.
Santa Claus turns up at midday, dressed in civvies. The dog has been found, unhurt but a nervous wreck. He is carrying an accordion that he asks me to take to the city to be repaired. He’ll pick it up fairly soon, he says. I tell him of my plans to travel abroad.
“I don’t know for how long,” I say.
“I don’t want to lose you,” he says. “I certainly don’t.”
“I’ll be a bit busy to begin with, then I’ll certainly be in touch and look you up.”
There’s no hurry, plenty of time ahead and vast expanses of sand. Then I add, clearly feeling my heart beat as I say it:
“I need to go on my own first, then we can go somewhere together, if we still want to.”
SIXTY-FOUR
As we drive down the side road, I see the whale has been cut open and that her calf is lying there in the car park beside her, all in one piece, two metres long and black just like its mother.
Before setting off, I ask the kid at the petrol station to take a picture of us and, as he carefully hands the camera back to me, he says:
“Did you know that the heartbeat of a whale can be heard from a distance of five kilometres?”
I say I didn’t know that.
“Then you probably also didn’t know that a whale’s heartbeat can disrupt a submarine’s communications and prevent a war?”
The turn behind the blind hill comes as a surprise. I’m not driving very fast, but still almost swerve off the road. The car runs on loose gravel and the bay opens up ahead, a long stretch of black, sandy shoreline strewn with seals. The sand is covered with their warm, glistening bodies, flipper rubbing against flipper. They move sluggishly, dozens at a time, as if they had overgrown the straitjackets of their own skin. I pull the handbrake on the side of the road and we get out.
The boy wants to take his shoes off and find a wish stone, whereas I wouldn’t mind hugging one of those seals and stroking its earless head.
There is plenty to choose from on the beach, thousands of stones to test one’s wishes on, every one you touch, one after another. We sit down. I arrange my stones in a small circle; Tumi assembles his in a small, vertical mound, one on top of the other, making a cairn, erecting a monument.
I have almost completed my circle and dash over to the car one moment to grab my camera. When I come back I see that he has pulled everything off: his hoodie, trousers, leggings, T-shirt and underpants. Stark naked in his snow-white skin, he abandons his clothes in a small bundle in the middle of the sand and charges towards the seals on the black shoreline, heading straight for the surf and sea. He is so white that his torso is almost phosphorescent and fuses with the white of the ocean and the heavens above. His approach triggers a clumsy stampede of seals into the water. I run after him in my bare feet, feeling the sharp shells and cold seaweed under my soles, sludge squishing between my toes and salty water reaching my ankles. I catch up with him in a pool of floating algae, throw my sweater around him and lift his cold little body onto my shoulders. There is black sand between his toes. He strokes my earlobes. I glance swiftly at the ocean before running back again.
“Lots of sea,” says the boy in a clear voice.
14:14, says my watch.
West, says the compass in the car.
He is dressed again and sits silently in the back seat, his chin buried in his overalls and the tip of his balaclava barely reaching the window. I fasten his belt.
After slipping an Astor Piazzolla bandoneon disc into the player, I turn on the heater full blast. Then I hand Tumi a sandwich and chocolate milk over my shoulder and pierce the hole with a straw for him. In return he stretches out his clenched hand with a bleeding smile. I unclasp his small fingers, one by one, and finally see his little front milk tooth in the palm of his hand.
FORTY-SEVEN
COOKING RECIPES AND ONE KNITTING RECIPE
A WORD OF CAUTION
The following are forty-seven recipes or descriptions of dishes/beverages and one knitting recipe that are connected to the narrative of Butterflies in November. The recipes more or less follow the same order in which they appear in the book. Some of them may make excellent meals, but it should be noted, however, that certain of these dishes may work better on the page than on a plate. Readers are warned that these recipes are, to some extent, fictitious and there is therefore always the risk that they may not be accurate down to the last gram or millilitre. The story also includes references to food that did not go down particularly well with the characters or to dishes that simply failed. No words can be categorical enough to exclude any possibility of misinterpretation and it is therefore up to the reader to find his or her own way. In this context, it is barely worth mentioning that the stuffing of the goose was made up of more than just the words on the page. Similarly, some of the descriptions of the dishes may be too elusive to be interpreted with absolute precision or for any usable recipe to be drawn from them. An example of this is “Not another of those spicy city recipes with beans” (Chapter Thirty-five).