Hotel Silence

by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir

  Also by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir

  Butterflies in November

  The Greenhouse

  HOTEL

  SILENCE

  Translated from the Icelandic by Brian FitzGibbon

  AUĐUR AVA

  ÓLAFSDÓTTIR

  Copyright © 2016 by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir

  English translation copyright © 2018 by Brian FitzGibbon

  Cover design by nathanburtondesign.com

  Excerpt from “For My Lover, Returning to His Wife” from The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton. Copyright © 1967, 1968, 1969 by Anne Sexton. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All Rights Reserved; excerpt from “Football Season Is Over” by Hunter S. Thompson used by permission of the Gonzo Trust; excerpts from “One Art” from Poems by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 2011 by The Alice H. Methfessel Trust. Publisher’s Note and compilation copyright © 2011 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or permissions@groveatlantic.com.

  Hotel Silence was first published in Iceland by Benedikt bókaútgáfa as Ör

  Published by arrangement with Éditions Zulma, Paris

  ICELANDIC LITERATURE CENTER

  We thank the Icelandic Literature Center for their generous financial support of this translation.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Grove Atlantic paperback edition: February 2018

  This book was set in 13.5 Centaur MT

  by Alpha Design & Composition of Pittsfield, NH

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data available for this title.

  ISBN 978-0-8021-2750-1

  eISBN 978-0-8021-6559-6

  Black Cat

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

  18 19 20 21 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Dedicated to all the unknown victims: nurses, teachers, bartenders, poets, schoolchildren, librarians, and electricians.

  And also to J.

  The formation of a scar is a natural part of the biological process, which occurs when a lesion to the skin or other body tissue grows after an accident, illness, or surgery. Since the body is unable to create an exact replica of the damaged tissue, the fresh tissue grows with a new texture and properties that differ from the undamaged skin around it.

  The navel is our centre or core and by that we mean the centre of the universe. It is a scar that no longer serves a purpose.

  —Bland.is

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Also by Rabih Alameddine

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  HOTEL SILENCE

  I. FLESH

  II. SCARS

  Notes

  HOTEL

  SILENCE

  MAY 31

  I know how ludicrous I look naked, nevertheless I start to undress, first my trousers and socks, then I unbutton my shirt, revealing the glistening white water lily on my pink flesh, half a knife’s length away from the muscular organ that pumps eight thousand litres of blood a day, finally I take off my underpants—all in that order. It doesn’t take long. Then I stand stark naked on the parquet floor in front of the woman, I am as God made me, plus forty-nine years and four days, not that my thoughts are on God at this moment. We are still separated by three floorboards, massive pinewood from the surrounding forest, which is carpeted with mines, each floorboard is thirty centimetres wide, with intermittent gaps, and I stretch out my arms, groping towards her like a blind man trying to catch his bearings. First I reach the surface of the body, the skin, a streak of moonlight caressing her back through a slit between the curtains. She takes one step towards me, I step on a creaking floorboard. And she also holds out her hand, measuring palm against palm, lifeline against lifeline, and I feel a turbulence gushing through my carotid artery and also a pulsation in my knees and arms, how the blood flows from organ to organ. Leaf-patterned wallpaper adorns the walls around the bed in room eleven of Hotel Silence and I think to myself, tomorrow I’ll start to sandpaper and polish the floor.

  I. FLESH

  The skin is the largest organ of the human body. The skin of a fully grown adult has a surface area of two square metres and weighs five kilos. In many other animals the skin is referred to as the hide or pelt. In old Icelandic the word skin also means flesh.

  MAY 5

  The table in Tryggvi’s Tattoo Parlour is covered with small glass jars of multicoloured inks and the young man asks me if I’ve chosen a picture yet or whether I’m thinking of a personal pattern or symbol?

  He himself is covered in tattoos all over his body. I observe a snake winding up his neck and wrapping itself around a black skull. Ink flows through his limbs and the triceps of the arm that holds the needle sports a coil of triple barbed wire.

  “Many people come here to camouflage their scars,” says the tattooist, talking to me in the mirror. When he turns around, as far as I can make out, the hooves of a prancing horse emerge from the back of his vest.

  He bends over a stack of plastic folders, chooses one, and runs his eyes over it to find a picture to show me.

  “Wings are a big favourite among middle-aged men,” I hear him say, and then notice that there are four swords piercing a flaming heart on his other upper arm.

  I have a total of seven scars on my body, four above my belly button, the point of origin, and three below it. A bird wing that would cover the shoulder, say from the neck down to the collarbone, would conceal two, even three of them. Like a familiar and comforting old acquaintance, its wing could become the feathered shadow of myself, my shield and fortress. The oily plumage would mantle the exposed vulnerable pink flesh.

  The kid flips swiftly through drawings to show me various versions of bird wings, finally pointing his index finger at one image:

  “Eagle wings are the most popular.”

  He could have added, what man doesn’t dream of being a bird of prey, drifting solitarily across the globe, soaring over mountain lagoons, gullies, and marshes, hunting for a prey to snatch?

  But instead he says:

  “Just take your time.”

  And he explains to me that he has another customer in a chair on the other side of the curtain and that he is just about to finish the national flag, complete with flapping and shading.

  He lowers his voice.

  “I told him the flagpole would bend if he put on two kilos but he insisted on having it.”

  I was planning on dropping in on Mom before her nap and wanted to wind this transaction up as quickly as possible.

  “I was thinking of a drill.”

  If my request has taken him by surprise, he shows no sign of it and immediately starts searching through the appropriate folder.

  “We mi
ght have a drill in here somewhere under domestic appliances,” he says. “Anyway, it’s no more complicated than the quad bike I did last week.”

  “No, I was joking,” I say.

  He looks at me with a grave air and it’s difficult to decipher whether he’s offended or not.

  I hurriedly dig into my pocket and pull out a folded sheet of paper, open the drawing, and hand it to him. He takes it and irons out all the corners before finally holding it up to the light. I’ve managed to surprise him. He is unable to conceal his incertitude.

  “Is this a flower or …”

  “A water lily,” I say without hesitation.

  “And just one colour?”

  “Yes, just one colour, white. No shadowing,” I add.

  “And no inscription?”

  “No, no inscription.”

  He puts the folders back, says he can do the flower freehand, and turns on the tattoo drill.

  “And where do you want it?”

  He prepares to dip the needle into a white liquid.

  I unbutton my shirt and point at my heart.

  “We’ll have to shave the hair first,” he says, turning off the drill. “Otherwise your flower will be lost in the darkness of a forest.”

  I mention the state where the slow suicide of all men goes under the name of “life”

  The shortest route to the old folk’s home is through the graveyard.

  I’ve always imagined that the fifth month would be the last month of my life and that there would be more than one five in that final date, if not the fifth of the fifth, then the fifteenth of the fifth or the twenty-fifth of the fifth. That would also be the month of my birthday. The ducks would have completed their mating by then, but there wouldn’t just be ducks on the lake but also oystercatchers and purple sandpipers, because there would be birdsong on the nightless spring day I cease to exist.

  Will the world miss me? No. Will the world be any poorer without me? No. Will the world survive without me? Yes. Is the world a better place now than when I came into it? No. What have I done to improve it? Nothing.

  On my way down Skothúsvegur I reflect on how one should go about borrowing a hunting rifle from a neighbour. Does one borrow a weapon the same way one borrows a hose extension? What animals are hunted at the beginning of May? One can’t shoot the messenger of spring, the golden plover, who has just returned to the island, or a duck hatching from an egg. Could I say that I want to shoot a great black-backed gull that keeps me awake in the attic apartment of a residential block in the city centre? Wouldn’t Svanur find it suspicious if I were to suddenly turn into a spokesman for ducklings’ rights? Besides, Svanur knows that I’m no hunter. Although I’ve experienced standing in the middle of a freezing cold river in my crotch-high boots, alone up on a heath, and felt the cold pressing against my body like a thick wall and pebbles on the spongy bed under my waders, and then felt how the river swiftly tugged at me below, how the bottom deepened and vanished, while I stared into the gaping, sucking vortex, I have never fired a gun. On my last fishing trip I came home with two trout, which I filleted and fried with chives I trimmed off a pot on the balcony. Svanur also knows that I can’t bear violence after he tried to drag me to see Die Hard 4. What does one shoot in May apart from one’s self? Or a fellow Homo sapiens? He would put two and two together.

  Svanur isn’t the kind of man who asks questions, though. Or who generally contemplates one’s inner life. He isn’t the kind of guy who would mention a full moon or comment on the northern lights. He’d never speak of the rainbow colours at the outermost ends of human knowledge. He wouldn’t even point out the colours in the sky to his wife, Aurora, the rose-pink hue of daybreak, he wouldn’t say, “There she is, your namesake.” No more than Aurora would mention the sky to her husband. There’s a clear division of tasks in their household and she alone drags the teenager out of bed in the morning. He, on the other hand, takes care of walking their fourteen-year-old border collie bitch who hobbles lamely in the front. No, Svanur wouldn’t mix any feelings into the issue, he’d just hand me the rifle and say, that’s a Remington 40-XB, bedded but with the original lock and barrel, even if he suspected I was going to shoot myself.

  The navel is a scar on people’s abdomen, which formed when the remains of the umbilical cord dropped off. When a child is born, the umbilical cord is clamped and then cut to sever the link between mother and child. The first scar is therefore connected to the mother

  The old folks sit stooped on park benches under woollen blankets in the cold spring sun, with a flock of geese nearby, paired off in twos. I notice a bird huddled on its own apart from the group, and it doesn’t move, even when I walk up to it. One of its wings is bent backwards, clearly broken. The wounded goose is partnerless and won’t procreate. God is sending me a message. Not that I believe in him.

  My mother slouches in a recliner, her feet don’t touch the ground, her slippers are too big, above them are her twiggy legs, she’s shrivelled to almost nothing, she has ceased to be flesh, as light as a feather, held together by her Styrofoam bones and a few tendons. What comes to mind is the weathered skeleton of a bird that has been left on the heath all winter; the vacant carcass remains, but ultimately disintegrates, turning into a ball of dust with claws. It is hard to imagine that this scrawny little woman, who doesn’t reach my shoulders, once inhabited a female form. I recognise her special-occasion skirt, which has grown far too baggy around the waist, far too big on her, clothes that belong to a former life, another time zone.

  I’m not going to end up like Mom.

  A smell hangs in the air, I walk through clouds of vapour emanating from bulging meatballs and cabbage. On the food cart in the corridor there are plastic bowls half full of red cabbage and rhubarb jam. Cutlery noises blend with the utterances of the personnel who alternately raise and deepen their voices to make themselves heard by their charges. There isn’t space for much furniture in the room, apart from an organ pushed up against a wall; the former maths teacher and organ player was allowed to keep it with her, once it seemed certain that she would never play it again.

  Beside the bed there are bookshelves that bear witness to my mother’s hobby: world wars, not least World War II. There’s Napoleon Bonaparte and Attila the Hun standing side by side, and a book about the Korean War and another about Vietnam sandwiched between two leather-bound volumes marked World War I and World War II in Danish.

  My visits are subject to daily rituals that are chiselled in stone and the first thing she asks me is if I’ve washed my hands.

  “Did you wash your hands?”

  “I did.”

  “It isn’t enough to just rinse them, you’ve got to hold them under the hot tap for thirty seconds.”

  It suddenly occurs to me that I was once inside her.

  I’m one metre eighty-five centimetres tall and the last time I stepped onto a scale—in the locker room of a swimming pool—I weighed eighty-four kilos. Does she herself ever wonder if that big man was really inside her at one time? Where was I conceived? Probably in the old double bed, that mahogany set with the attached bedside table, the bulkiest piece of furniture in the apartment, a massive schooner.

  The girl is taking away the food tray. My mother had no appetite for the dessert, prune pudding with cream.

  “This is Jónas Ebeneser, my son,” I hear my mother say.

  “Yes, I think you introduced us yesterday, Mom …”

  The girl has no recollection of that, because she wasn’t on duty yesterday.

  “Jónas means ‘dove’ and Ebeneser ‘the helpful one.’ I got to choose the names,” Mom continues.

  It dawns on me that perhaps I should have asked the guy at Tryggvi’s Tattoo Parlour to place a dove beside the lily; the two doves together, me and the bird, both with a few greying hairs.

  I hope the girl will have vanished before the recounting of my birth begins. But she’s not leaving because she puts down the tray now and starts to arrange the towels.

&
nbsp; “Your birth was more difficult than your brother’s” is the next thing my mother says. “Because of the size of your head. It was as if you had two horns on your forehead, two stumps,” she explains, “like a bull calf.”

  The girl gawks at me. I know she is comparing mother and son.

  I smile at her.

  She smiles back.

  “You smelled different, you and your brother,” Mom continues from her armchair. “You smelled of clay, a cold and wet smell, cold cheeks, you were muddy around the mouth and came home with cat scratches on the back of your hands. They didn’t heal well.”

  She stalls as if trying to remember her next cue in a script.

  “My Pumpkin wrote an essay about potatoes when he was just eleven years old and called the essay ‘Mother Earth.’ It was about me, the essay …”

  “Mom, I’m not sure she’s interested in … Sorry, what’s your name?”

  “Diljá.”

  “I’m not sure Diljá is interested in this, Mom …”

  On the contrary, the girl seems to be genuinely interested in what Mom has to say. Nodding sympathetically, she leans against the doorframe.

  “It’s incredible when you look at this hulk of a man today and think of how sensitive he was.”

  “Mom …”

  “If there was a bird with a broken wing in the garden he’d weep … He was an open wound … Always worried about whether people were being good enough to each other … When I’m big, he said, I want to mend the world … because the world was suffering, because the world needed to be taken care of … My Pumpkin was always so fond of the twilight … when the shadows fell, he lay on the floor by the window and stared at the clouds and sky … so musical … Then he locked himself in to make a puppet theatre … made marionettes out of wet newspapers, painted them and sewed clothes onto them, locked the door and stuffed the keyhole with toilet paper … When he was a teenager he was still worried sick about the world … I’m not going to get married unless I fall in love, he said … Then he fell for Gudrún, a nurse and the head of a ward, who then became a midwife too, and took a course in management …”