Hotel Silence

by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir

  I ask myself whether I’ve misheard him or whether he might attribute some other meaning to that word than I do. But Svanur isn’t the type to speak in metaphors.

  Should I tell him that I haven’t touched a woman’s bare flesh—not deliberately at least—not held a woman with both hands for eight years and five months, or since Gudrún and I stopped having sex together, and that apart from my mother, ex-wife, and daughter—the three Gudrúns—there are no women in my life. There is no shortage of bodies in this world, however, and they occasionally have the power to stir me and remind me that I am a man. A woman steps out of a hot tub, water trickles down her flesh and the mounting steam engulfs her; it’s close to freezing outside and the half-moon wading through the clouds enters the scene just before the swimming pool closes. It’s also possible that I may have unwittingly grazed bare arms in a short-sleeved shirt while I was in line at a store, or that a woman’s hair may have touched me as she was bending over; the girl who cuts my hair springs to mind, for example. When she shampoos me at the sink, she stands behind me, massages me around the temples and says I have good hair. I once asked her what she was thinking and she laughed, looking at me through the mirror, and answered: a certain man and recipe. No, I would need to shoot myself, to shred my flesh with a steel bullet to feel the body. That’s what men do.

  “Because some of Aurora’s friends were asking whether you were chasing skirt. She asked me and I told her that you’re not chasing skirt at the moment. They asked Aurora if you were over your wife yet and she asked me and I told her you weren’t. They wanted to know whether you frequented cafés or the theatre and I said I didn’t think so. They asked if you’re a reader and I told Aurora that you are, so she told them and they seemed to be quite excited by that and wanted to know what kind of books and I said novels and poetry, and they wanted to know Icelandic or foreign and I said both.”

  Before I know it, I’ve popped the question:

  “I was wondering if you could lend me a rifle. For the weekend.”

  If my request has caught him off guard, he isn’t showing any sign of it. Instead he nods, takes off the apron, and places it on the back of the chair, as if he had been waiting for me to mention the weapon. He vanishes into the living room and I hear him rummaging through a locked cupboard. In the meantime, I examine two photographs on the fridge, one of Svanur in a fleece jacket with the dog by his side and the other of Aurora in a group of smiling women. They’re in outdoor gear and hiking boots and half of the group is kneeling as if it were a photo of a soccer team. After a short while he returns with the rifle and leans it against the wall, beside the mop. He motions towards the pictures.

  “Once the caravan is fixed, Aurora and I can find our own patch of moss by any babbling brook we want.”

  He then sits opposite me at the table and pours himself another glass of milk.

  I hear him say that he suspects Aurora has started to read poetry.

  “When I slipped past her through the bathroom door last night, she said that I was eclipsing her horizon.”

  He shakes his head.

  “Sometimes I feel it’s better to think about Aurora than have her beside me. She’d never understand that.”

  He has his elbows on the table, hands in front of his face, and speaks between his fingers.

  “Aurora doesn’t realise that a man has got stuff going on inside. That a man has a feeling for beauty. Oil leaks from the car onto the wet asphalt and the rainbow colours make me dream of another reality.”

  I stand up, take the shotgun, and Svanur escorts me to the front steps. I hold the weapon under my arm, with the barrel pointing down.

  Should I tell him how things are, that I’m not going to grow old?

  Does he suspect that?

  If I were to ask Svanur to give me just one reason why I should continue to live.

  I’d only ask for one, but it could be two.

  By way of explanation, I’d say that I’m lost.

  Would he then say: I know what you mean, I don’t know who I am either. And embrace me in the gap of the hall door, half inside and half out, his body framed in a rectangular halo, over a hundred kilos, in a T-shirt tucked into his trousers at the front and hanging out at the back. Two middle-aged men locked in an embrace on the steps in front of the entrance, the fifth of the fifth?

  Aurora would call out: “Who’s there? If they’re selling dried fish or prawns, take the prawns. Don’t buy any liquorice. It’s not good for you.”

  What could Svanur say that would be a revelation to me?

  Would he look for some appropriate poetic or philosophical quotation on death? Would he find the words to change the situation? Or would he just say:

  “You’ll die soon enough anyway. You can be sure of that. Talk to me again in thirty years’ time and then you’ll be clinging to every minute like a dog to a bone. Like your mom.”

  Instead he says:

  “Have I shown you the scar already?”

  “The scar? No, what scar?”

  “From the slipped disc operation.”

  Before I know it, he’s yanking his T-shirt out of his trousers and pulling it up behind. There are few people on the street in the middle of a workday.

  A large scar stretches along his spine. I picture how the guy at Tryggvi’s Tattoo Parlour would tackle this with a quad bike or snowmobile, but I resist the temptation to reveal my water lily.

  “Did you know,” he says, “that in some places in the world scars are symbols that command respect and a person who bears a big and impressive scar is a person who has looked a wild beast in the eye, tackled his fears, and survived?”

  I walk across the street with the rifle under my arm, up to the fourth floor, and lay it on the double bed.

  Most scars on the skin are flat and pale in colour and only retain a small portion of the wound that caused their formation

  I just got through the door when the phone in my pocket rings.

  It’s the nursing home. A messenger. The woman apologetically introduces herself as a member of the staff who is helping my mother make a phone call. My mother was expecting me today but I didn’t show up. She says this hesitantly and cautiously, as if she knows it’s only been two hours since I visited Mom and that I seldom visit less than three times a week. She passes the phone to Mom. My lunchtime visit has been erased from her mind.

  Mom’s voice quivers on the line:

  “This is Gudrún Stella Jónasdóttir Snæland, can I speak to Jónas?”

  “It’s me, Mom.”

  “Is that you, Jónas?”

  “Yes, this is my number you called, Mom dear.” She wants to know why I never visit her.

  I tell her I came today.

  She mulls this over and, while she tries to get her bearings, I hang on the line.

  When she comes back to me she says she remembers my visit well, but forgot to ask me something when I was there. If I have a saw. The job she wants to ask me to do is to remove the branch of a tree that keeps knocking against a window by her bed and prevents her from sleeping.

  “Your father kept his toolbox in our bedroom. He was a reliable man, your father, even though he wasn’t much fun.”

  She hesitates.

  “Did you say you were going on a journey?”

  “No.”

  “Didn’t you say you were going to war?”

  “No, not that either.”

  She dithers again.

  “Are you going on a special mission, Pumpkin dear?”

  Special mission. I think about that term. Like to save the planet. Discover a new vaccine?

  “No.”

  There is yet another long silence on the phone. Maybe she’s trying to remember why she called.

  “Don’t you want to live, Pumpkin dear?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “At least you still have all your hair. The men on my side don’t lose their hair.”

  Before I know it, I’ve said it:

  “Gud
rún Waterlily isn’t mine.”

  I could have added she isn’t the blood of my blood. I haven’t procreated anything, the line dies out with me.

  I hear rustling at the other end and voices in the distance that seem to be drawing closer. There is a prolonged silence before she continues:

  “Your father and I visited a history museum on our honeymoon. That was about as romantic as it got. But what struck me the most was that the soldiers’ uniforms were made out of such thin material. Made out of lousy sheets, all for show.”

  “I know, Mom.”

  I sense there is something still bothering her.

  “Who’s Heidegger?” Mom finally asks.

  Didn’t I once write an essay about Heidegger in my only year at university? Wasn’t he the one who claimed that humanity’s relationship with reality should grow out of a sense of wonderment? Like a child or a young animal.

  “A German philosopher. Why do you ask?”

  “Because he phoned this morning and was asking for you. I told him he had the wrong number.”

  Apologia pro vita sua (A defence of one’s own life)

  A number of other options were certainly considered. It occurs to me, for example, that I could take down the ceiling light and use the hook. A decision also has to be made about the location. I stage different scenarios in my mind. Should I shoot myself in the living room or hang myself in the bedroom, kitchenette, or bathroom? I also have to choose what clothes to wear. What would be appropriate? Pyjamas, Sunday best, work clothes, in my socks or shoes?

  Suddenly I remember that Waterlily has a key and might barge in on me. It would be typical of her to be standing there in the middle of the living room out of the blue to share something she had just discovered. She would say:

  “Dad, did you know that bird couples only migrate to this island once and therefore can’t draw any lessons from the experience?”

  How long would it take for her to start worrying about me? What’s more, she’d be the one who would have to go through my stuff. I think of the basement downstairs, which is full of junk that should have been sorted and thrown away long ago. Shouldn’t I spare her the burden?

  As soon as I open the basement door, I see the stool I designed and built when Gudrún and I started living together. It has an adjustable seat that can be raised and lowered. There’s the toboggan and the orange tent that takes the better part of a day to put up, sleeping bags and hiking shoes. I haven’t been down in this basement since I moved into the block and I sidestep my way between the boxes. One of them is marked with Mom’s wobbly handwriting: “Tea set, to go to Jónas.” On a shelf there is a dollhouse I built for Waterlily and, next to it, the old record player. I’d forgotten that.

  A large toolbox lies in the centre of the floor, containing various tools I rarely use: a selection of chisels, a ball-peen hammer, a number of Phillips screwdrivers, handsaws, putty spatulas, a fretsaw, a carpenter’s plane, an angle, a compass, rasps, files, three carpenter’s rulers. I have a claw hammer and screwdrivers of various types and sizes in the toolbox I keep under the sink or in the trunk of the car. It also contains a drill, the first tool I bought after I met Gudrún. We rented a basement apartment in the Furumelur district that had a ruined linoleum floor, so I read up on it and managed to lay down a parquet on my own. Once I’d learned that, I found out how to tile, wallpaper, and change the plumbing. I thought in metres, length and width, 170 times 80 or 92 times 62. I agree with my mother when she says it’s easier to express suffering in numbers than in longing, but when I think of beauty I nevertheless think of 4,252 grams and 52 centimetres.

  Far in the corner lies a battered cardboard box, carefully taped and labelled THROW AWAY with a black felt-tip marker. If I remember correctly, this is the box that was also supposed to be thrown away in the last and second-to-last move and it has remained unopened in several cellars. Why is it still here then? I fetch a box cutter from my toolbox, splice through the tape, and lift the lids. It seems to be mostly university books from my only year at university. I pick up Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche and skim through a pile of typed essays and handwritten glossaries. In the middle of the box there is a brown envelope. I open it and pull out a twenty-seven-year-old newspaper cutting with a yellowed obituary about my father. It’s written by one of his friends, who offers condolences to his surviving wife. He also mentions his two sons, Logi, the living image of his father, doing his final year in Business Studies, and Jónas, who has his mother’s talent for music and is taking his first year in Philosophy. It occurs to me that in just two weeks I’ll be the same age as Dad was when he collapsed on the doorstep. Maybe the same genetic defect will spare me the bother?

  “I looked out the kitchen window and saw your father staggering and I thought he was drunk,” said Mom. “When I came out he was lying on the path. They took him away and left me on my own.

  “Some people don’t follow you all the way,” she added.

  That same evening, Mom removed Dad’s shirts from the hangers on his side of the wardrobe and piled them up on their bed.

  “Don’t you want to wait with that, Mom?” I asked. “At least until the funeral?”

  We gave all the clothes away and because Mom didn’t want to run into anyone wearing his coat, I was sent off with four bags of his clothes to a neighbouring town.

  It used to get on my nerves when Dad would ask how I was getting on at school, I even suspected he was secretly researching the subject. That hunch was confirmed when we were going through his stuff; he had ordered a book entitled How to Ask Clever Questions about Nietzsche.

  I slip the obituary back into the envelope and dig deeper in the box. At the bottom there are three worn-out notebooks. I open one of them and recognise the immature handwriting. Scrawled. Are these the diaries I wrote when I was around twenty? I skim through them and according to the dates, they span three years—with intervals.

  THROW AWAY. That box is going into the garbage. I pick up another and rapidly browse through it, pausing here and there. As far as I can make out, it’s divided between descriptions of clouds, weather, and trips with women. The philosophy student’s quotations from Plato’s Symposium immediately set the tone on the first page and show that I managed to focus on the essentials in my studies:

  “All men possess a procreative instinct, both physically and mentally, and when our bodies reach a certain age they feel an urge to reproduce.”

  Each entry starts with a date followed by a description of the weather, like an old farmer’s almanac: March 2. Still, sunny, temperature -3 degrees. April 26. Strong winds, temperature 4 degrees. May 12. Gentle southeastern breeze, temperature 7 degrees. Closely connected to these weather reports are entries in which I describe various types of cloud formations and contemplate heavenly bodies. Wind-sculpted altocumulus. When did I stop thinking about clouds? Followed by: It is considered possible that a new moon may be circling the earth. However, several experts believe it is more likely to be the fragment of a rocket in motion.

  And among the long-extinguished stars in the middle of the cosmos, a shopping list rotates on an elliptical path by the celestial pole:

  Buy strawberry yogurt and condoms.

  But I don’t have to go far to realise that descriptions of female bodies and relationships with women make up the lion’s share of the entries. It seems I refer to girlfriends by their initials and thank them for sleeping with me. Thanks, K appears on one page, Thanks, D on another. Sometimes the initial is underlined. Thanks, M. M appears twice and so does K, with some months in between. Was it the same K? The accounts contain parenthetical asides. L (pure virgin). I had spent several summers in the country at my maternal uncle’s sheep farm and drew my analogies from the valley of the glacier: (K’s skin is as smooth as a lamb’s lungs). Two days later it’s S. I desperately try to remember. For the first time in my life I had a chance with girls and I remember a woman looking at me and me thinking: this could work. I flick between entries. G seems to be t
he last letter in the flesh alphabet, is that Gudrún? I’m twenty-two years old when I thank G for sleeping with me and, as far as I can tell, it happened on a mountain climb. (G has a recent scar from an appendix operation but I didn’t mention it) I wrote in brackets.

  I skim through the notebook in search of a particular date:

  October 11, 1986.

  Cycled home from school. On my way to Silfurtún, I see Reagan and Gorbachev on the steps of Höfdi House. They’re both wearing coats, one a trench coat and the other with a furry collar. There were also three geese in the field. I saw them on TV that night, in black and white, like sand and a glacier. Then I wrote and underlined the words: I was there.

  A day later I wrote on the same page:

  October 12. Dad is dead.

  The world is not the same.

  I extend my life by three days and borrow Svanur’s trailer to empty the basement.

  I take three trips up to the apartment, one with the stool, another with the record player, and the final one with the cardboard box marked THROW AWAY.

  The higher we soar, the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly

  I peep into the fridge to see what’s there: two eggs in a carton marked “from our most experienced hens.” In the cupboard there is a packet of fusilli pasta, how long should they be boiled, don’t they tend to swell up? On the windowsill there’s a parsley plant that I’ve been trying to keep alive, mostly withered now. I scramble the eggs and clip the green stems over the pan.

  While the pasta is boiling, I peruse the last pages in the graph paper diary.

  One entry stands out, due to its length, three whole pages of uninterrupted text. I seem to be describing a mountain climb and I have added an underlined title, as if it were a short story: Climbing the steps of the initiation temple. According to the date it’s June the seventh and I’m not travelling alone because the entry opens with: G asked to come along.

  Borrowed the Subaru from Mom after choir practice (broken exhaust pipe). Have had my eye on this mountain for some time (longer than on G). Have slept with four girls in the choir and morale is low. The choirmaster (a friend of Mom’s) pulled me aside and told me the tension was affecting the voices.