Hotel Silence

by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir

  “I want to be paid in tools,” I say.

  And I turn over the menu and make sketches.

  “I need both a normal saw and a jigsaw,” I say.

  Screws

  Chisels in two widths

  Sandpaper

  Spackle

  Brushes and scrapers

  He has sat down at the table in front of me and is making out his list too. There are a few things that need to be checked out at Restaurant Limbo.

  “And,” I add, “I want to be able to choose the menu. Not just birds and stew. No more pigeons.”

  Afterwards he wants to seal the deal with a shot.

  The sun is red and sinking when I return to the hotel.

  That night I dream there’s a rat on the loose in the bedroom.

  The floor is covered in scraps of wood and I recognise fragments of furniture from my and Gudrún’s home, including the adjustable stool I made.

  Virility is to kill an adult animal

  I was longer than I had planned working on the windows on the top floor of the women’s house and soon the curfew begins. It’s getting dark and before long the moon will be the only source of light. I check to see if I can spot the moon and whether it’s in its place.

  All of a sudden I get the feeling that I’m not alone, that someone is watching me, and I think I hear footsteps, but not so much footsteps as becoming aware of a big silent shadow vanishing behind the corner ahead of me. An animal comes to mind. A big cat. What species did the actress say had escaped from the municipal zoo?

  I’m close to the square of the hotel and pause to scan my surroundings, but spot nothing, neither animal nor man. Not a soul in sight.

  A figure promptly materialises in front of me and seems to be in a rush. I can’t work out which is bigger, the moon or the man, whether it is rising or he is drawing closer, it rushes into the clouds and he heads straight for me. As soon as he comes up to me, he utters something I can’t understand. Was it a question or a statement? Before I get a chance to answer, I feel a swift blow and, a moment later, I’m lying in the street. And I feel another blow and red rain pouring over me. Something hot and wet trickles down my temples. The man looms above me like a lunar eclipse, or tank, and kicks me. I smell the scent of aftershave and leather. I think, should I defend myself or count myself into the night? Then, just as quickly, he has stopped beating me and I hear footsteps moving away and see the glow of a cigarette like a blip in the middle of the moon. Then I hear a scooter being kick-started. There’s a taste of blood in my mouth but I feel an odd contentment. Something furry and familiar rubs against my shoulder as I lie in the street; it figures, it’s the cat from the restaurant, the one-eyed cat. I stretch out my bleeding hand to stroke him, a burst of black particles swirl around my eyes.

  I clamber to my feet. I hear footsteps again, someone running towards me from the hotel.

  “Mister Jónas,” I hear an anxious voice call out. It’s Fifi who rushes over and grabs me under the arm. I feel cold, but manage to remain totally lucid in my thoughts:

  If the actress asks me to sleep with her when she comes back from her journey, I’ll say yes without hesitation. It’s been more than a week and she hasn’t returned yet.

  FOUR

  Four stern faces look down at me, inspecting me: May, Fifi, the boy, and an unknown woman.

  I’ve already vomited once and I have to vomit again.

  “You’ve suffered a blow to your head and a concussion, and we have to stitch that cut on your forehead,” says the woman, pulling out a syringe. Out of a toolbox.

  “A few stitches,” she adds.

  I catch a whiff of orange peel and when I turn my head I see the boy standing close to the bed, holding a slice of orange, he’s wearing a T-shirt that reads “Stockholm I love you.” Taking another step forward, he presses himself right against the edge of the bed and lifts the blanket that someone has spread over me, to conduct an examination. I try to remember; it was Fifi who dragged me to my room.

  “Hi,” I say, trying to smile at the boy.

  His mother says something to him and he lets go of the blanket. Then she looks at me, she’s upset and has tears in her eyes.

  “What happened?” she asks. “Who attacked you?”

  I think I answer her but can’t be sure.

  “It’s okay,” I say.

  I am like molten rock. I’m like other people, I suffer, I wrote in my diary when I was twenty-one years old. In the sentence above I had written: Full moon. Three degrees.

  When I stand, it’s not just my head that pulsates but the whole room, revolving. I spin, I feel as if I’m looking at the earth from the peak of a mountain, outlines vibrate and slowly shimmer, as if under plexiglass.

  I stagger to the bathroom to throw up.

  When I lie down again, the unknown woman bends over me and shines a light in my eyes. She tells me to unbutton my shirt so she can examine me, while May gathers her brother and son, drawing them back into a corner of the room. They stand in a cluster, observing.

  The woman asks disjointed questions: what my name is, how old I am, and asks me to count my fingers. I have five on one hand and five on the other, unlike many others in this town.

  “Are you married?”

  “Yes,” I say. “Or to be precise, no.”

  I sit topless on the edge of the bed.

  “Are you married or not?”

  “Not anymore. Divorced.”

  “Do you have any children?”

  “Yes. Or no. I have a daughter, but I don’t.”

  She continues unfazed.

  “When is your birthday?”

  I feel as if I’m looking at them and the bedroom in disjointed freeze-frames, jamming and hopping from one to the next, waiting for the film to start running smoothly again.

  “May twenty-fifth.”

  The woman looks at May and she looks at her brother. They look at each other.

  “That’s today,” says the woman.

  I reach for my passport and hand it to them, it’s passed around. I notice how they scrutinise it and turn the pages.

  What should I do about this? Invite them to a birthday party?

  “You’re bruised but nothing’s broken, so from that point of view you’re lucky,” she says when she’s finished examining me. “You can button up your shirt.”

  Then she nods at me as she’s packing her bag.

  “Nice flower.”

  MOM

  “You spoke about your mother,” May says. “Before the doctor came in. You said, Mom. I understood it. You repeated the word.”

  When I look at her questioningly, she adds:

  “One doesn’t have to understand everything that is said to understand.”

  I ask her what day it is.

  “Is it Monday?”

  “No.”

  “Tuesday?”

  “No. Wednesday.”

  “How long have I been here?”

  “Three weeks.”

  I stand up and ask her if there is a male choir in the town. She’s bewildered.

  “Yes,” she says hesitantly. “I think they’re short of voices. Tenors mainly, I think.”

  “I must call my daughter,” I say.

  “Are you going back home?”

  “Not yet. I have some things to finish.”

  She smiles.

  Then she remembers something.

  “By the way,” she says, “the house has been connected to the water supply. Water started spurting into the sink. So things are looking up.”

  If I were to ask her what she dreams about, what would she answer? Of light springing on the horizon again?

  A man only dies once

  They let me use the phone at the reception desk.

  It takes a few seconds for Waterlily to answer:

  “Is that you, Dad? Is everything okay?”

  “Yes, everything is fine.”

  Her voice is tearful and she says she’s been beside herself with worry since
she found the letter and I disappeared.

  “It was impossible to get hold of you.”

  She says she found my mobile phone on the bedside table, and the wardrobe in the bedroom was empty.

  “Yes, I gave away the clothes.”

  I hesitate and add:

  “I didn’t need them anymore.”

  I try to remember the letter and what I’d written. She enlightens me:

  “You said you were going on a journey without saying where or for how long.”

  She says I’m inarticulate and once more asks if everything is okay. Where am I exactly? What am I doing and when am I coming home? Did I get into some trouble? I hear she’s fighting back the tears.

  “Mom is worried too,” she adds.

  My voice wavers when I ask:

  “Really, was Mom worried too?”

  “Yeah, Mom too. She’s not indifferent to you,” she adds after a moment’s hesitation.

  She says she received the postcard yesterday, with a picture of a mosaic wall and the name of a hotel, but that no one answered at the phone number she found online. She adds that she and her mother are not happy about the fact that I chose to go to the most dangerous country in the world.

  “Not anymore. The war is over.”

  She rephrases it:

  “Well, certainly one of the most dangerous countries in the world.”

  I hear her blowing her nose.

  “Isn’t everything in ruins?”

  “Yes.”

  “And land mines everywhere?”

  “Yes, that too.”

  Should she catch a plane? Can she come to me?

  There is silence at the other end of the line. Has she started to cry?

  I take a deep breath before I say it:

  “Your Mom says you’re not mine. She had a boyfriend when we met.”

  I could have added, just before we went on the mountain hike on which you should have been conceived. With ptarmigans, a sheep, and the mountain as our witnesses.

  “After the mountain, there was no one else but you,” Gudrún had said.

  “Yes, I know. At first I was angry, but now it doesn’t matter. I’ve got no other dad but you.”

  “And the other one?”

  “Am I to swap dads after twenty-six years? Are you really going to disown me? And abandon me?”

  There’s silence on the phone.

  “Is that why you went away?” she then asks. I say nothing.

  “Why is there so much money in my bank account?”

  “I sold Steel Legs Ltd.” And add: “I’m trying to simplify my life.”

  “I suspected something was up when you asked me whether I was happy,” she says finally.

  Before I realise it, I hear myself saying:

  “I’m going to extend my stay. I’ve got a job.”

  “Job?”

  “Yes, sort of. It’ll delay me. For several weeks.”

  “Several weeks?”

  “Yes, I’m helping some women here to fix up a house.”

  “Some women?”

  Now she’s the one repeating what I say.

  “There’s a girl here the same age as you. She has a young son.”

  “Does she have a crush on you?”

  I hesitate.

  “I’m not sure. Maybe.”

  “And you, do you have a crush on her?”

  “Like I said, she’s your age. A few years older,” I add.

  “You haven’t answered my question.”

  “No, it’s not like that. There’s a shortage of handy men who own drills.”

  “Did you take it with you? The drill?”

  “Yes.”

  Silence.

  Then I say:

  “I feel a responsibility.”

  It’s as if I could hear Svanur’s voice: “He who knows and does nothing is the guilty one.”

  I can hear her breathing, so she hasn’t hung up.

  She is still on the line.

  “Do you remember, Dad, when we lay on our tummies over the frozen lake and looked down at the vegetation below the ice?”

  “Yes, I remember that.”

  “Promise you’ll phone.”

  “Promise.”

  “Happy birthday, Dad,” she says finally.

  Few men kill, most just die

  I see from a streak of light in the corridor that the man’s door is open. He’s in a robe and waiting for me.

  “There’s no point in getting the police involved in the case” is the first thing he says to me when I stagger down the corridor after finishing the green pea soup Fifi cooked for me.

  The world keeps on turning.

  Still.

  He says this nonchalantly, as if he were talking to himself.

  “Aren’t you curious to know why you weren’t killed?”

  “No.”

  “They thought you were someone else.”

  I don’t ask who else, nor do I tell him that it’s quite possible I may be someone other than who I am. That I don’t know where I end or begin.

  “Were you afraid of dying?”

  “No.”

  “No, you’re the type of person who would rather be killed than kill. You’re not the kind of guy who has grazed knuckles at the end of a fight.”

  I don’t bother answering him.

  He continues:

  “If you should have been killed, you would have been killed.”

  One man is no competition for a contractor. A man with a drill doesn’t stand a chance against a bulldozer.

  “Has the sewage system been sorted?”

  “They can thank you for that, the ladies.”

  He changes the subject.

  “Apart from that I quite like you. Per se.”

  He knows Latin.

  “But I immediately saw that you were in some kind of trouble, in too much of a hurry to get away from yourself, a man with no luggage, we all know what that means.”

  The order of things

  I quickly browse through the last diary. At the back there are several scattered, undated sentences. One per page:

  Is it true that the year 525 immediately followed the year 241?

  And two pages later, I wrote:

  Not everything happens in the right order.

  This is followed by several blank pages. And then this sentence:

  Everything can happen. It can also be different than what one expected.

  In the evening there is a knock on the door, low down. Adam stands outside, followed closely by his mother.

  May is holding a cake and presents it with a smile.

  “Happy birthday, Mister Jónas,” says the boy.

  “He’s been practicing,” she says.

  I have drawn the blinds on the windows but the sun squeezes through the gaps and forms an elongated box on the floor, a white patch of light that falls on the tiles.

  The boy hands me a drawing that depicts three trees with large crowns and orange peaks surmounted by a green sky.

  “A forest,” the mother interprets.

  They stand in the middle of the light, the mother and son, directly above the maze.

  Clouds crash-landing salty tears

  I wake up with a headache and pain all over my body. The bedsheet is pasted to me and I feel strangely clammy, my skin tingles with goose bumps, as if it had suddenly been covered with highly sensitive receptors to the world.

  I wander into the bathroom and look into the mirror. My face is swollen and bloated and starting to darken around the eyes.

  I turn on the shower and stand under the warm jet until the hot water runs out. The water is blood-tinted at first. I grope my body, joints, shoulders, wrists, knees, collarbone. I have a nasty scratch on my side, lacerations and cuts on my palms. When I’ve finished washing, I pluck the stones out of my hands, tiny pebbles the size of peas, I put on my pink shirt in honour of the day, and step out onto the balcony. The heavens have sunk and opened. I stretch out my hands and turn the palms up to
the sky—there is a white band around the finger on my left hand where I used to wear my wedding ring—then I slowly raise my hands to the heavens and allow the rain to pour onto my wounds and the pink shirt, which clings to my water lily.

  I have a body.

  I am my body.

  Suddenly a transparent butterfly flutters towards me, perches on my arm and folds its silver wings, it’s huge. The rain pitter-patters on the balcony. And I think to myself, the women’s house is rain-proof now. I changed the last window the day before yesterday.

  Words have consequences

  Fifi is standing outside the bedroom door with a box of books in his arms, wearing a cap backwards.

  “I thought you might like to have the rest,” he says, “instead of having to go down to the basement every time you want a new book.”

  He puts the box down in the middle of the floor.

  “You can calmly and slowly go through them while you’re recovering,” he adds.

  I tell him I’m almost better.

  He looks at me with great scepticism.

  “Not that I can see.”

  He reaches into the box and pulls out a book.

  “There’s a phrase book to learn the language, which you might be interested in. I recommend it. Obviously no one speaks Icelandic here and not everyone speaks English either.” I open the book and see that it’s designed to help tourists get by in various circumstances, such as ordering in a restaurant, buying a train ticket or stamps at the post office, asking for the route out of the woods. The pronunciation of the words is written in brackets at the end of each sentence. I browse through the pages. There is a special chapter called “Troubleshooting,” which, among other things, includes the following phrase:

  I’m lost. How can I get back to my hotel?

  And similarly:

  Please wait a moment while I search for a phrase in this book.

  I skim ahead and see that on the last page it says:

  It was all a misunderstanding, I’m very sorry.

  Further on there is a chapter called “Things That Sometimes Get Lost,” which includes an exhaustive list:

  Raincoat

  Gloves