Hotel Silence

by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir

  I reflect on the question.

  “No one. Myself,” I add.

  “Who sent you? Williams?”

  “No.”

  “You must have some plan of action. Everyone has a plan. Business is all about focus.”

  He lowers his voice and looks around. The corridor bends at the corner and for a moment I think I see a small being dashing past the end of the passageway, and that it’s naked, a little pale body that then vanishes in a flash, like a lizard fleeing the light.

  “No one comes here without a mission. The best opportunities are now, the community is weak, lacks structure, and you can strike good deals. My friend is buying land and buildings.”

  I can almost hear Mom’s voice: “War is a gold mine.”

  The man stands in front of me, pours some liquid out of the bottle into the toothbrush glass, and empties it.

  I slip past him.

  “Ever since I was a kid I’ve longed to kill someone,” I hear him say behind me. “The only way to do that legally was to join the army. When I was nineteen years old, the dream came true.”

  I’m expecting him to ask me if I’ve tried killing. I would then tell him that I’ve fished trout.

  Instead he says:

  “You’ve got to create a system that the enemy doesn’t understand. That’s warfare. That’s beauty. That’s how Tal thought, leading his team to victory by sacrificing one man after the next.”

  MAY

  The first thing I notice when I stick the key into the lock and open the door is the pool of water on the floor and, next to it, the boy sitting on a chair, wrapped in a towel with his toes dangling out. His mother is busy changing the bedclothes, the sheets are crumpled and the pillow lies on the floor. I notice that she has wet hair. My nine items have been rearranged on the table, in a straight line, like a train, one carriage after another. When the boy sees me, he covers his ears.

  “I’m sorry” is the first thing the girl says. “After you fixed the pipes, this is the only shower that works. There is so little pressure in the water in our room. Just a few drops. I used the opportunity while you were away.”

  By “our” she is clearly referring to herself and the boy.

  She says the boy ran out of the shower, which explains the puddle on the floor. Adam had then crawled up on the bed.

  So the boy’s name is Adam.

  “He was so happy,” she says as she picks up the wet towels.

  The boy observes us but still keeps his hands over his ears.

  She apologises again and says she should have asked me for permission. I tell her not to worry and that I’ll take a look at the pipes in their room.

  She says she actually intended to offer to switch rooms and move me to the other side of the corridor. In fact, she’s already getting the room ready.

  “That way you don’t have to look down on the bullet-pocked street and you can have a view of the beach just like me and Adam.”

  The only issue is the shower in the bathroom, but she was wondering if I could take a look at the pipes. “To see the problem” is how she puts it.

  After leaving with the child in her arms, enveloped in a towel, and going up to their room on the floor above, she reappears again. I see she has wound her wet hair into some kind of bun and tied it with an elastic the way Waterlily does sometimes.

  It doesn’t take me long to reassemble my earthly possessions—nine items—and I follow her into the new bedroom.

  She has put clean sheets on the bed and opened the blinds and says that Fifi helped her move the desk in.

  “I see you write,” she adds, carefully scrutinizing me.

  I assume Fifi must be her brother and imagine she is referring to the diaries.

  A forest landscape painting hangs over the bed, not unlike those that hang in the other bedroom and the lobby, green boughs, green shadows, and a greenish sky. I notice that in the middle of the painting there is a cluster of light and in the middle of the light stands a leopard.

  I step closer to examine the painting.

  “Yes, there is one painting in each bedroom,” she explains, positioning herself in front of the picture.

  I sense they’ve all been painted by the same hand, since it transpires that they are all initialled with the letters “AD” in the bottom right-hand corner. She says she doesn’t know the identity of the artist but has heard that the theme is the local forest.

  “Before the war the painters around here painted trees and poets wrote about perfumed forests and transparent leaves rustling in the wind,” she says expressionlessly.

  Then she takes a deep breath.

  “Now this same forest is a death trap. Full of land mines. Those who dare to go there don’t see any leaves growing on the trees. Instead of cutting firewood, people prefer to rip up their parquets to heat their houses.”

  She takes a breath.

  “Why should one want to venture into the woods?” I hear her say in a low voice. “Not to pick pinecones.”

  My new bedroom has a small balcony and a stairwell that looks like a fire escape and leads down into the backyard of the hotel. She points out the window and says that the garden has been swept for mines, but nevertheless she recommends that I stick to the path if I’m going down to the beach.

  “There used to be a golf course once, but it was dug up in the war to plant vegetables.”

  We stand side by side at the window observing the arid vegetation.

  “I remember the smell of grass before the war,” she continues, “and all kinds of berries: blackberries, raspberries, strawberries.”

  She hesitates.

  “Then it was replaced by the smell of burning rubber, melted metal, dust, and blood. Especially blood.”

  She is silent but then continues.

  “The first summer of the war was the most difficult, that the sun should be shining, birds chirping, and flowers sprouting out of the cold earth, and bombs exploding. One didn’t expect it.”

  I say nothing.

  “We’re hoping for rain,” she says finally. “It hasn’t rained for two months and the land is parched.”

  We both slip into silence, she is still standing by the window.

  Should I tell this young lady who dreams of hearing the pitter-patter of rain in a tin bucket that soon something green will grow here again, out of the dust, just wait and see? I could even quote the “Somnambulist Ballad” by the poet who was shot and buried in some unknown place, and say that here something green will grow, Green green I want you green, wouldn’t that upset her? And add that the poet believed that a better country awaits us, bright beyond the edge of the sea. It also occurs to me to tell her that my sheep-farmer uncle and his young farmhands have burnt the withered grass every spring and left the scorched earth, black stumps that prickled out of the ground and smouldered for weeks on end after the flames licked the moss and heather, but ultimately it was overgrown in grass again, so good and green.

  “We don’t understand why we haven’t had any spring thaw this year,” I hear her say.

  The cabdriver said the same.

  “We are waiting for rain,” he’d said as he shifted gears with his steering hand and the car swerved over to the other side of the road. “And when it starts to rain,” he continued, “the river rises by about six metres and flows over the fields where the bodies lie, and skeletons in uniforms rise out of bottomless lakes. Then we will finally be able to bury the dead.”

  She suddenly approaches me with an outstretched hand. It’s time for introductions.

  “May.”

  I hold out my hand in return.

  “Jónas.”

  Our relationship has become personal now.

  That means I can no longer impose myself on her by killing myself on her watch.

  ADAM

  The mother and son’s room is number fourteen on the second floor. Like the other hotel rooms, there are few personal items there, apart from some toys. The boy is in his pyjamas, with water-combe
d hair, sitting at the table eating an apple that has been sliced into pieces. He feigns not to see me. On the floor there is a row of little plastic men he has arranged one behind the other, with equal gaps, not unlike my tools on the table.

  The mother and son clearly share the same bed, a stuffed rabbit lies on a pillow adorned with pictures of puppies.

  “We fled with virtually no belongings, running from one place to another,” she says when she sees me scanning the room. “Adam was born at the beginning of the war and has never had a home.”

  She follows me into the bathroom with the wrench and stands beside me as I clean the pipes. I also have a roll of black insulation tape, which I use on the spots where the seals have started to leak.

  “This is just a temporary solution,” I say.

  As I’m cleaning the pipes, she tells me that she had just graduated as a librarian when the war broke out and she worked in the children’s department of a library.

  “We tried to live a normal life in between our escapes. I took on whatever jobs came my way and in the meantime Fifi took care of Adam. Sometimes I was paid, sometimes not.”

  Once the water acquires a natural colour and pressure, she brings me the bedside lamp and shows me the wiring. She says she changed the bulb, but the lamp doesn’t work so she was wondering if it might be something else.

  I immediately see the plug needs to be changed.

  She nods with a grave and apprehensive air.

  “It can be complicated to get spare parts,” she explains, adjusting a lock of hair. “The stores are out of stock. You have to have connections,” she adds.

  The words of the man in the leopard socks in the hall echo in my mind: you can buy anything if you have the right contacts.

  Then she’s suddenly positioned herself in front of me with her hands planted on her hips and wants more detailed information on my real purpose here.

  “It’s not at all convincing that you are here on vacation,” she says. “With a drill.”

  She tugs the elastic out of her hair and then almost immediately slips it back on again.

  I remain silent. I’m good at remaining silent.

  “Mom said you didn’t talk,” Waterlily said. That isn’t quite true, however, since at the beginning of our relationship, I did. I spoke and G was silent, it says in the diary entry about our hike in the mountains.

  She looks me in the eye and won’t give up.

  “Why are you here?”

  I hesitate and stop myself from repeating that I’m on vacation. Instead I say:

  “I’m not sure.”

  She scrutinises me.

  “Have you come to collect something? Buy something?”

  “No.”

  “Sell something?”

  “No. I have no plans.”

  I can’t tell this young woman, who has been through so much to survive with her son and younger brother under showers of bombs—in a country in which blood flows through the river beds where firing squads passed a few weeks ago, dying the water red—that I have come all this way to kill myself. I can’t explain to these people that I’ve come here with my toolbox to set up a hook, that I travel with my drill the way others travel with their toothbrush. I can’t tell her—after all she’s been through—that I’m going to saddle her and her brother with the chore of taking me down. My unhappiness is at best inane when compared to the ruins and dust that lie outside my window.

  Do you know? It’s spring tears, spring tears that fall on the black sand

  When I’m alone again I open up the door onto the balcony. It takes some time to wrestle with it because the hotel hasn’t been heated for a long time and the wood has swollen. It would have been best if I had a hand plane to smooth the edge, but I manage to solve the problem with a few sheets of sandpaper I brought with me. While I’m at it, I tighten two screws on the handles. On the balcony there are pots of withered flowers, so I fill the toothbrush glass with water and pour it over the plants. I do it in a total of four trips.

  The sea is closer than I’d expected and gives off a scent of very ripe, sweet fruit. I don’t have to look long to realise that this is totally different than the churning ocean I’m used to, there are no giant waves here, as heavy as slamming metal doors, no swirling white mounds of surf that pull up stones and suck down boats; what appears before me from my window is a giant, salty swimming pool or a floating mirror.

  I pay no heed to the recommendation to stay along the path to the deserted shore, but on my way I notice that the firewood shed is almost empty.

  “No one’s willing to chop firewood,” the girl had said.

  Should I walk into the sea?

  How far out does one have to swim to exhaust one’s self?

  A bird swirls above me.

  One circle.

  Will he dive down and strike me?

  Two circles.

  He lands. I notice the bird is limping and finding it difficult to take off again. In a country of warfare and dust even the animals are maimed; dogs hop on three paws, cats have one eye, birds one leg.

  As I’m standing on the beach I suddenly remember the pod of whales Gudrún and I once drove past on the coast, where five or six of them had swum ashore and become stranded. We grabbed shovels from the trunk and dug holes at the water’s edge to try to keep them alive and get them floating again.

  “It’s important,” she said when we got back to the car, “to share memories.”

  Had we stopped sleeping together by then?

  I remove my socks and shoes, stand in the cold mud until a salty puddle forms around me and sucks me down. When the foam reaches my ankles I turn away.

  If it is possible to compare the two, me and the world

  When I get back I turn on the shower, take off my clothes—the same I arrived in—and stand naked on the cold floor. The water isn’t red anymore now that I’ve fixed the pipes.

  Before me is a mirror and in it the outline of an unknown male body with a snow-white water lily on his chest, over the heart. Like a stamped trademark on a pale sailcloth. I haven’t examined myself in a mirror for many years, not all of me. Have I ever done that? The mirrors back in my apartment hadn’t been designed for a man who was one metre eighty-five centimetres tall. I used the mirror in the bathroom to shave, not look at myself.

  I’ve got skinny, Mom would say.

  I’m exposed. Ludicrous.

  I feel the muscles in my upper arms and my stomach, but find it difficult to discern whether I’m the person in the mirror or the other.

  I still have all my hair, as Mom rightly points out. Like the bristles of a brush pointing in the air. And the hair barely white.

  On one side there is me and, on the other, my body. Both equally strangers.

  Were we together in school, did I meet that guy the summer I worked on tarring the roads, were we acquaintances? Is this the young man who pondered celestial bodies?

  The sun hasn’t shone on this body for some time. Not as a whole. I haven’t sunbathed for seventeen years. It was an unusually hot June day, seventeen degrees in the shade, so I allowed myself to be in swimming trunks as I was nailing boxes around ten strawberry plants for Gudrún. I didn’t lie down because I’m a Homo erectus, an upright man who is always busy doing something.

  Gudrún lay sunbathing beside the strawberry beds in the ocean breeze, ginger-haired with a pinkish-red complexion, bit by bit the freckles merged. Every now and then, she hoisted herself on her elbows to spread some tanning lotion on some part of her body. She had a book, read a few lines, and then closed her eyes in between. There was a bush nearby and, after a short while, a shadow formed and she got up with the rug and moved to a patch of the lawn with less shade.

  I turn on the light in the new bedroom. All the lamps are working. Soon darkness stretches over the town like a woollen blanket and it gets cooler. A dog howls—is it the one with three legs?—and then vanishes.

  What shall I do until I sleep?

  I fetch one of
the diaries and sit on the bed. It’s the middle one. The two of us are here together, my former self and my present self, the boy and the middle-aged man.

  What makes a boy write: Thanks for life, Mom. Why not Dad? I thank Mom for giving birth to me and girls for sleeping with me. I’m a man who expresses gratitude.

  Mom says she had wished she’d had a daughter.

  I too would certainly have liked a sister. Instead I had girlfriends. That I slept with. Four in the same week, if the diary entries are anything to go by.

  Apart from that, I have a very foggy image of that boy who describes cloud formations and female bodies. It’s clearly something we have in common, he and I, that he doesn’t know who he is any more than I do.

  I don’t exist yet is written in clear letters under the date October 24.

  A few pages later there is a sentence I have crossed out with one fine stroke of the pen, but that is still legible: How did I become me?

  N regularly appears in entries beside the other letters—K, A, L, S, and G—but I don’t have to read far to realise that it isn’t a girl I’ve slept with, because in one place N is fully named as Friedrich Nietzsche. On the basis of the dates and quotations here and there, I spent a whole year reading Beyond Good and Evil. That was my year at university. My diary seems to have served as a glossary.

  Whatever remains in him of “person” seems accidental, often arbitrary, and disruptive. It takes effort to think on “himself,” he’s not infrequently mistaken when he does. He confuses himself with others, he is wrong about his basic needs.

  My attention is drawn to the fact that death is omnipresent, appearing at three-page intervals along with that wonderful experience of suffering.

  Two days after Dad’s death, I write: People die. Other people. One dies. By “one” I mean myself. I die. Because life is the most delicate thing of all. If I have children they’ll die as well. When it comes to that, I won’t be with my children to hold their hands, to comfort them.

  And an entry on the following fourteenth of April reads: