Hotel Silence

by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir

  At our latitudes people mostly kill themselves in the spring. People can’t bear the idea of the earth renewing itself. Of everything starting anew except themselves.

  This isn’t a bad boy. He’s innocent and well-meaning. I notice how weather and cloud descriptions are gradually supplanted by environmental concerns, with entries about the thinning of the ozone layer, greenhouse gases, and global warming. The glaciers recede and eventually disappear. In just a few decades these vast water reservoirs of the world will have disappeared.

  What would I say to that boy today? If he was my son, I mean?

  I turn the page.

  The following is written at the top of the next:

  I don’t believe in God anymore and I fear he no longer believes in me.

  I swiftly skim through the diary.

  On the second-to-last page it transpires that my former self gave blood.

  Went to the blood bank and donated blood. And below—on a new line—three words: I feel dizzy.

  As far as I can make out, the visit to the blood bank gave rise to two pretty interesting reports on the final page.

  Places where I’ve done it:

  Bed (A, K, L, D, G, S), graveyard (E), car (K), staircase (H), bathroom (L), summer house (K), public swimming pool (S), crater (with G).

  And straight after that:

  List of places I haven’t done it: blood bank, art museum, police station (etc.).

  I close the diary and turn off the light. What thought should I choose while I lull myself into the darkness? I’m sitting with Gudrún Waterlily in my arms on a carousel—she chose a unicorn—and her mother, my wife, waves at us—while everything spins and the world expands at the speed of light. We wave back at her. Then the world slows down again and shrinks into a tiny iris, just before it’s switched off, before I’m switched off.

  The wonderful experience, the suffering, ignites hope

  I have no change of clothes, apart from the single shirt dangling on a wooden hanger in the wardrobe. What am I to do about that? Why didn’t I take any clothes with me? I get my red shirt and put it on.

  I rub my jaw. Shouldn’t I shave? I haven’t shaved in four days.

  “The hotel shop might have razors,” said May.

  I ring the bell and wait for Fifi to appear.

  “Did May mention we had razors?” he says when I ask him.

  He has stepped behind the reception desk in a hoodie and jeans. He’s not wearing his white shirt, but I notice he has white dust in his hair, as if he’d sprinkled flour over it. He’s taken the headphones off his ears.

  “Yes, she mentioned a hotel shop.”

  “That was packed away in the war. That was actually before my time,” he adds after some thought.

  He opens a drawer, rummages through it, and finally fishes out a bundle of keys.

  “I think this is the one for the storage room,” he says, beckoning me to follow him down a corridor behind the reception desk, then down a staircase to a locked door.

  It takes him some time to find the right key.

  “There should be a storage room here,” he explains as he tries out the keys.

  The young man seems to be just as dumbfounded as I am when he opens the door and gropes at length for a light switch.

  The room is quite large, windowless and crammed with an assortment of items, souvenirs and all kinds of gifts that have been stacked on rows of shelves, but also in boxes on the floor. In the middle, there is a postcard stand and another one with sunglasses. On the shelves there are swimsuits with price tags, goggles, toys, inflatables, and towels. I’m transfixed by inflated brightly coloured animals that have shrivelled and lost their shape: a green crocodile with a limp jaw, a totally deflated leopard, a yellow giraffe, a purple dolphin. I also spot a box full of ballpoint pens with “Hotel Silence” inscribed on them.

  This is undoubtedly the hotel storage room. The remains of a world that was. The remains of a world of bright colours.

  Fifi moves some objects, shuffling them from hand to hand, like a child in a toy shop, and is visibly bewildered.

  “I haven’t explored everything at the hotel,” he explains. “May and I have only been here five months.”

  It is clear from his expression that he doesn’t know where to start.

  “They should be somewhere, razors.”

  And he sidesteps between the piles on the floor, opening boxes and cartons containing suntan lotions, lip balms, soaps, colouring books, postcards, and sealed hotel toothbrushes.

  In one corner of the room is a half-open box that turns out to be full of books.

  “I think these are books that the hotel guests left behind,” says the young man after a brief examination.

  He digs into the box.

  “They’re in different languages,” he concludes.

  I bend over and run my fingers over the volumes: there’s Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain and also Doctor Faustus; Jerusalem by Selma Lagerlöf; a collection of poems by Emily Dickinson; Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman; A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf; and another poetry book by Elizabeth Bishop. I open it, skim through and read some lines about how The art of losing isn’t hard to master. Because so many things seem filled with the intent/to be lost, Bishop writes, the author who herself had lost a watch, mother, house, cities, two rivers and a continent.

  Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys …

  I put the poetry book back into the box and pick up Yeats, browse through a few pages and pause on: Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.

  The young man observes me inspecting the books.

  “Someone must have wanted to get rid of those books because they didn’t like them enough to keep them. You’re welcome to take some, if you like. May told me you’re a writer yourself.”

  He stoops over the boxes and seems to be puzzled by everything they contain.

  “I wanted to study history,” he says, “that’s if I’d gone to college. But ever since I realised that it’s only written by the victors, I don’t want to anymore.”

  He straightens up and is holding a packet of disposable plastic razors.

  “We only have Venus, pink,” he says, handing me the bag. Six of them.

  I’ll try them. I tell the young man I’ll also take a ballpoint pen out of the box and shove it into my breast pocket.

  He asks me if I need anything else.

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Condoms, mister Jónas?”

  “No, thanks.”

  He says he’s not too sure about how to price the goods, but that he’ll stick the razors on my bill.

  I notice him scanning the room and moving things on the shelves as if he were searching for something.

  I decide to make use of the intimacy of this space to mention the mosaic mural one more time. When I’d bumped into him the last time, he had said that the remarkable thing about this wall I was asking about was that there was absolutely no trace of it, and no one was aware of hot springs in the area.

  “It’s all very strange,” he had said.

  This time he hesitates and I seize on the opportunity to insist some more. Yes, that’s right, he now remembers that there are some hot springs in the area and he confirms that there are, in fact, baths in the basement of the hotel, but that they are closed at the moment.

  The answer regarding the mosaic mural is noncommittal, however.

  “That’s right, there were”—he uses the past tense—“somewhere around here some famous murals, but they’re not accessible to tourists right now.”

  He continues to open boxes while he’s talking, looking into them and closing them again.

  “Will they be soon?”

  He hesitates again.

  “Well, they’re actually packed away.”

  He’s standing by the postcard stand and gives it a spin.

  “Since we’re starting to get tourists again, maybe we should try putting a few of these in the lobby
,” he says.

  Yearning is stronger than pain

  There are three of us sitting at as many tables for breakfast. I see that the actress is by the window with her slice of bread and cup of coffee. There is a pile of papers on her table. I have greeted her three times. The neighbour from my corridor sits at the third table, and that’s the sum of the guests. The coloured paper lanterns that hang from the ceiling draw my attention because the room seems to have been decorated for a feast.

  “From the beginning of the war,” says Fifi, when he brings the coffee over. The wedding was cancelled in the end. They used to hold a ball here too once a year. For New Year’s.

  Honey is offered for the bread and I remember what I read online about bee breeding when I was booking the hotel. Fifi also told me that the bees died during the war and honey production has ceased.

  When the actress sees me, she smiles and stands up, takes her coffee cup, gathers her pile of papers, and walks towards me. I notice that my neighbour from the corridor is watching both of us, and adjusting his chair and posture to keep us clearly in sight. He is wearing a yellow velvet jacket, Bermuda shorts, and striped socks.

  Alfred, he said his name was.

  The actress asks if she can sit with me, puts down her papers, and adjusts a scarf around her neck.

  Slowly.

  Then she says she saw me down on the beach.

  “Yes, I was checking to see if the sea was salty.”

  She smiles.

  “And was it?”

  “Yes, it was.”

  She gazes out the window.

  “That isn’t the same sea you have in your parts.”

  “No, it’s not the same sea we have in our parts.”

  A woman speaks to me and I’ve immediately started to repeat her. She says she was born and raised in this country but moved abroad long before the war.

  “We shot a movie here back then. It was popular to shoot films in these parts that were meant to be set somewhere else completely.”

  She speaks, I shut up.

  I like to sit opposite a woman and to shut up.

  “I stood here on the last day of the shoot,” she says, pointing at the square in front of the hotel. “My costar stood there,” she continues, pointing again. “He stretched out his hand when a shot was fired. The filming went badly. We did the scene six times and used gallons of artificial blood. We had good fun in the evening. It was all make-believe. Then it turned into reality and the movie felt phoney.”

  She suddenly falls silent and looks around. The man from room number nine has disappeared.

  “In the months preceding the outbreak of hostilities, people started to vanish from the face of the earth, journalists, university lecturers, artists. Then ordinary people from next door. People weren’t prepared for the need to adopt the right opinions about the government. Entire families disappeared like they’d never existed. By then the country was suddenly full of weapons.”

  We both shut up.

  “People are gripped by despair when they realise what the situation is, but can’t change it,” she says finally.

  She leans over the table and looks straight at me. And lowers her voice.

  “There used to be a zoo in town,” she continues, “but the animals were shot at the beginning of the war. They say that one wild animal managed to escape. People aren’t sure of the species, but they say it was a big male beast, some say a tiger, others a leopard, and others again a panther. Various stories are told about what became of it. Some even say the beast is managing the reconstruction.”

  She adjusts the scarf around her neck again, finishes her cup of coffee, and scoops the sugar from the bottom with a spoon.

  Then she says she’s on her way into the country but will be back in ten days. Her plan is to visit some members of her family, but also to scout for locations for a documentary and look for interviewees.

  “The documentary is about how women handle communities after a war,” she adds, brandishing a rolled-up script. “They also shoulder the responsibility for keeping the family together and it’s a terrible strain.”

  She says something else, but I’m thinking of the emphasis she placed on the fact that she is returning. She wants to know if I will have left when she comes back.

  “Will you be gone? In ten days’ time?” she asks with feigned nonchalance.

  I reflect on this. In the land of death there isn’t the same urgency to die.

  “No, I don’t expect to be gone,” I say. And I think, this is the kind of place to linger in.

  There are so many voices in the world and none of them is without meaning

  May is waiting for me when I return to the room. She has a formal request to make. That’s precisely how she words it:

  “I have a formal request for you,” she says.

  She’s wearing a black blouse and draws a deep breath as she shuffles her feet in the doorway.

  “My brother and I had a chat and decided to ask you if you could help us with some small repairs at the hotel. To be more precise, a few small jobs.”

  She pauses.

  “That is to say, when you’re not sightseeing.” The use of the term sightseeing seems slightly alien to her.

  She says they can’t pay me much for it because they haven’t had many tourists yet, that is to say, apart from the three of us—me, the lady, and the man—and therefore they’ve had no revenue yet. They would rather pay with bed and board. It occurred to her, for example, that I might want to prolong my stay and extend my vacation with more vacation. She says this hesitantly, as if she were trying out the words together, vacation and vacation. And stay for an extra two weeks. Even three. That would include room and breakfast.

  “Fifi and I discussed this last night and we agree.”

  What exactly they agree on, she doesn’t say.

  She edges into the room and stands in front of me. Her hair is in a ponytail, like Waterlily’s.

  “There’s a shortage of men,” she says. “And tools. Those who didn’t die in the war or flee the country are busy doing other things. A whole generation of men disappeared. Foreign contractors don’t fix cupboard doors and doorknobs.”

  I tell her what I’ve told her before, that I’m neither a carpenter nor a plumber. And not an electrician either.

  “You have a drill.”

  I give this some thought.

  Since I’ve already told the actress that I will be here when she comes back in about a week’s time, I need to have something to do. Which is why I say:

  “I really want to help you. I can’t do everything,” I add, “but I can do some things.”

  She smiles from ear to ear.

  Then she turns serious again.

  “Any chance you could start tomorrow?”

  “If you like, I can start straightaway,” I say.

  HOMO HABILIS 1 (HANDYMAN 1)

  There are sixteen bedrooms and it takes us a while to find the keys that fit the locks. We move between floors and May opens and closes doors. We step into dusty rooms, she pulls back the curtains and shows me what needs to be fixed.

  Most of them are small repairs I can easily cope with, although I would have wanted to have better tools with me. I think of my bigger toolboxes in my basement on the other side of the ocean. It transpires that many of the cupboard doors are hanging on just one hinge, and locks, knobs, and window handles need to be repaired. I also need to check the pipes, switches, wiring, plugs, and sockets.

  Each room has its own design but all have a fireplace, with a gilt-framed mirror over the mantle, and a forest landscape painting over the bed featuring an animal and a hunter. Their other common feature is the fact that they haven’t been heated for a long time so the same musty smell hovers in the air. There are fissures and damp patches in a number of places on the walls and cracking paint on the ceiling. The leafy wallpaper which is to be found on one or two walls of each room is worn-out and has started to peel at the seams.

  I don’t m
ention paint to the girl, since I assume it is difficult to come by. The furniture, on the other hand, is of good quality and, on the whole, the hotel is in a pretty good state.

  “Compared to the rest of the country,” as May emphasises.

  I explain that, to begin with, the rooms need to be aired to get the dampness out of the walls. All of the floors have threadbare handwoven rugs and I suggest we roll them up and carry them outside to beat the dust out of them.

  As we’re rolling up the first rug, beautiful turquoise tiles are revealed with peculiar square patterns reminiscent of a maze.

  We stand in the middle of the floor admiring the tiling.

  “Yes, I think this was the old town centre,” she says, and explains how each town has—or had—its own particular pattern, its tiling. Turquoise is the signature colour of this town and is to be found in the old neighbouring mines. This matches the information I found about the mosaic mural that no one seems to have heard of or can trace.

  She circles the room looking at the tiles and I hear her say that her father was a palaeographer and some of his friends were archaeologists. I omit to tell her I drove past the ruins of the National Archive on the way to the hotel. She has nothing else to say about the tiles, but instead sinks onto the bed, bowing her head. Her palms turned upwards.

  “My father was the head of the manuscript department of the National Archive and he was shot at work. We were allowed to collect his body from the street corner where it was abandoned.”

  She falls silent.

  “You can’t show a child his grandfather who has been shot in the head,” she adds.

  I lift up the rolled carpet, lean it vertically against some corner of the room, drag over a chair and sit opposite her.

  “Mom waited too long to flee,” she says in a low voice.

  Could I tell this young woman in a skirt and blue blouse with two unfastened top buttons that sometimes men shall beat their swords into ploughshares? Would that sound meaningless? To say that it’s possible to be human again after being a wild beast? Or is it impossible maybe?

  She pulls a handkerchief out of her pocket and blows her nose.