Hotel Silence

by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir

  “Mom …”

  Smothered by the stuffiness of the hot room I walk towards the window that overlooks the lake, a set of red lights from last Christmas blink relentlessly on the windowsill. Draped over the window, which is forbidden to be opened to allow in even the slightest draft of cold air, are the living room curtains that Mom brought with her from our old house in Silfurtún and shortened. I recognise the pattern. From that vantage point one can observe a hearse backing out with its daily cargo.

  “My little Gudrún Waterlily was conceived between two tussocks at the end of May, as freckled as a golden plover’s egg, and highly educated on sea matters, and with some boyfriend who is a rapper and chews tobacco and wears an earring, not a normal earring, but some ginormous piercing with a whole spool of thread, a good-natured guy from the fishing village of Eskifjördur who watched over his granny when she was on her deathbed …”

  “Mom, we get the picture …”

  “Some men never recover after being jilted …”

  “You can’t trust everything she says,” I say and open the window.

  Then it’s as if she were about to recount something, but can no longer remember what she was going to say and she fades like a transmitter that has lost its signal. For a moment she has vanished into another world and another time, where she is trying to navigate through a foggy landscape, to find a guiding star. She is a young girl who has lost her sheep and casts her misty gaze around the room, old faces slowly filing past the barren landscape.

  The girl silently ducks out the door and my mother tries to adjust her hearing aid, to tune into my wavelength, into the earth’s magnetic field, the correct time frequency.

  I stand by the bookshelves and glance at the titles: War and Peace by Tolstoy, A Farewell to Arms by Hemingway, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Elie Wiesel’s Night, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski, Sophie’s Choice by William Styron, Fatelessness by Imre Kertész, Saying Yes to Life in Spite of Everything by Viktor Frankl, Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man. I pull Paul Celan’s collection of poems off the shelf and flip to “Death Fugue”: “we drink you at night / we drink and drink.” I slip the book into my pocket and pull out the First World War.

  “Since you came out of your mother’s womb there have been 568 wars,” says the voice from the armchair.

  It is difficult to know when my mother is actually with us because she’s like an electrical current that comes and goes, or should I say a flickering candle. Just as I’m thinking she’s extinguished, she unexpectedly flares up again.

  Once the girl has left, I help my mother into bed. I hold her under the arm and she drags her slippers along the light green linoleum. What does she weigh? Forty kilos? It would take less than a gust to knock her over, the slightest breeze, even a puff of air would completely flatten her. I push two embroidered cushions aside and sit on the edge of her bed for a moment. She lies down and her body disappears into the mattress. The perfume I gave her is on the bedside table, “Eternity Now,” because my mother likes to dab the back of her ears with the hereafter. She holds my hand, blue veins, the worldly-wise back of her hand, her nails are polished once a week.

  Mom was the one who helped me with maths when I was in secondary school and she couldn’t understand why it wasn’t a piece of cake for everyone.

  “Equations are a cinch,” she’d say.

  And she explained to me how I could work out square roots without using a pocket calculator. She said the square root of 2 (√2) is the number that gives two when it is multiplied by itself. We are therefore looking for an unknown number x, which is therefore x · 2 = 2. We see that x is between 1.4 and 1.5 because 1.42 = 1.96 < 2 but 1.52 = 2.25 > 2. The next step is to look at the numbers between 1.40, 1.41, 1.42, and so on up to 1.49. It turns out that 1.412 = 1.9881 < 2 and 1.422 = 2.0164 > 2. This demonstrates that the square root of two is somewhere between 1.41 and 1.42.

  “Have they negotiated a truce?” I hear her ask from the bed.

  She gets her hair done once a week and the spring sun pouring through the western window illuminates her beautifully shaped light purple hair; she is a ball of fluff in the sunrays.

  “Sixty million killed in World War II,” she continues.

  Talking to Mom is like talking to no one. That suits me fine, it’s enough for me to feel the warmth from another living body. I decide that she understands me and come straight to the point.

  “I’m unhappy,” I say.

  She pats the back of my hand.

  “We all have our battles to fight,” she says, before adding: “Napoleon was exiled from himself. Josephine was lonely in her marriage, just like me.”

  On top of the bookcase is a row of framed photographs, most of them of my daughter, Waterlily, at various ages. Two are of me and two of my brother, Logi, both equally represented. In one of the pictures I’m four years old and standing on a chair, hanging on to my mother’s neck. She is wearing a light blue sweater and dark red lipstick and a white pearl necklace. I have a brush haircut, like a hedgehog, and have one bandaged arm in a sling. This is my oldest memory; they had to nail the arm together. Mom stands by the organ. What was being celebrated? Was it her birthday? I see now, as I peer at the picture, that there is a Christmas tree in the background. It’s been forty-five years since that photograph was taken and the boy’s expression is genuine and sincere.

  The other picture is a confirmation photo. My lips are slightly parted and I’m staring at the photographer in bewilderment, as if a stranger had woken me up, as if I had yet to feel my way in the world that I’d been born into. It was a world made of teak with floral wallpaper in every room; apart from that it was all in black and white, like the TV.

  I make one final attempt:

  “I don’t know who I am. I’m nothing and I own nothing.”

  “Your father didn’t live through the Iranian war, nor the Iraqi war, nor Afghanistan, nor Ukraine, nor Syria … nor the Kárahnjúkar power plant protests, nor the roadwork that doubled the width of the Miklabraut highway …”

  She stretches across the bedside table and pulls out some red lipstick.

  Shortly after that I hear her launch into the Nordic king sagas:

  “… Haakon Athelstan, Harald Bluetooth, Sweyn Fork-beard, Cnut the Great, Harald Fairhair, Eric Bloodaxe, Olaf Tryggvason …” she rattles off.

  She is getting agitated and tells me she’s busy.

  “I’m a bit busy, Pumpkin dear.”

  The news is about to start and she half rises to turn on the radio and tackle the war of the day in the news summary, after which she will lie down with the death notices and funeral announcements in her ear.

  When I leave, I call the help line to let them know there is a goose with a broken wing at the old folk’s home.

  “A male bird,” I say. “Alone. With no mate.”

  And then I try to remember, didn’t Hemingway shoot himself with his favourite rifle?

  … the scepticism of manliness, related to the genius for war and conquest

  The guy at the tattoo parlour had told me that my skin would be sore for a few days and that I could expect it to redden, or possibly even to itch and burst into a rash. If the skin started to swell and I developed a fever, I might need to take antibiotics or, in the worst-case scenario, go to an emergency room. I wouldn’t be surprised if I were already experiencing the first symptoms.

  Svanur is polishing the Opel when I get back from Mom’s, the caravan sits ready in the driveway. He is wearing sandals and an orange fleece jacket, emblazoned with the logo of the tire company he briefly worked for a few years ago. We met when he was working at Steel Legs Ltd., and it was actually Svanur who told me about the vacant attic apartment on this street, opposite his and Aurora’s place. Apart from that, we’re not close. At the moment he’s convalescing at home, recovering from a slipped disc operation. Two “stay-at-home men” is what he calls us.

  He has set up two folding chairs on
the sidewalk, as if he were expecting a guest, and beckons me over.

  I get the feeling that my neighbour has been watching me; when I came out this morning he was lingering near the trash cans with his dog and watching my front door.

  Over the past few days his visits have also multiplied; he needed to borrow a wrench of a specific size and then returned it and asked me to help him lift the new fridge he just bought for the caravan. First and foremost, though, he wants to chat about what occupies his entire brain: motorised vehicles and the status of women in the world, two fields of interest that he tries to combine as much as possible. He drags over one of the folding chairs and signals me to sit. I have no alternative but to chat with my neighbour.

  “People don’t take good enough care of their cars” is the first thing he says to me. “We live on an island that’s blasted by the sea and rusts the chassis. It’s not enough to spray it once a year and change the oil; you’ve also got to polish it regularly. Three coats of polish and rubs in between. It’s just garbage the stuff they use in those car washes.”

  He leans on the other folding chair.

  “Some people drive on punctured tires for years and end up having to change the whole wheel.”

  Svanur doesn’t do conversations, but instead delivers monologues without looking at me, gazing somehow beyond me, as if the person he were really talking to were somehow beside or above me.

  “When you think about how women are treated in the world, it makes you ashamed to be a man,” he continues.

  He straddles the chair and leans forward, pressing his elbows against his knees.

  It transpires that Svanur has subscribed to some foreign TV channels and last night he watched a documentary about the circumcision of women and a current affairs programme about women and war.

  “You’ve got a daughter …”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you know that women do 90 percent of all the work on earth, but only own 1 percent of its assets? And what do men do in the meantime?”

  He doesn’t wait for an answer and continues:

  “They dawdle, get drunk, and wage war.”

  He holds his big blacksmith’s hands up to his face, his fingers greased with oil.

  “Do you know how many women are raped every hour?”

  “In the world, you mean?”

  “In the world, yes.”

  “No.”

  “Seventeen thousand five hundred.”

  We both fall silent.

  Then he continues.

  “And do you know how many women will die giving birth tomorrow, Tuesday, May the sixth?”

  “No.”

  “About two thousand.”

  He draws a deep breath.

  “And as if it weren’t enough for them to die giving birth, they have to endure forced marriages.”

  He removes his glasses, which are as thick as the bottom of a bottle and haven’t been polished for ages. He says that he’s near-sighted and astigmatic and that, if he takes off his glasses, the outline of the volcano on the other side of the bay goes fuzzy. He looks straight at me for the first time.

  “We who are in the know and do nothing are the guilty ones.”

  There is a swarm of small birds in the garden, they fly off the roof, under the drainpipe, and vanish in an instant. I stand up and he then tells me there’s an American chocolate cake in the oven and he’s wondering if I’d like to pop in.

  “Betty Crocker,” he adds. And after a moment’s hesitation: “Aurora is on a gluten-free diet.”

  So Svanur bakes.

  He says that he just stuck the cake into the oven and that it should be ready in a short while.

  I think it over. I have yet to borrow the hunting rifle from him.

  “It’s good for men to have someone to confide in,” I hear him saying.

  I tell him I’ll be over soon.

  I first need to pop into my apartment to check on something.

  I am a watercolor.

  I wash off

  This morning half a mountain is visible through the kitchen window, as well as a stretch of the cold green sea; the mountain vanishes as yet another floor is added to the high-rise that is being built.

  I turn on the computer and Google famous writers who have killed themselves. The number of pages on this subject surprises me. I would never have imagined there was such a large group of famous men and women who decided at some point to put an end to their lives. My recollection was correct: the author of The Sun Also Rises and To Have and Have Not had used his favourite rifle. Nor do I need much time to confirm my suspicion that most men shoot themselves, although it is more prevalent in countries where gun ownership is more widespread. I scroll down a page and see that a short story writer shot himself with a shotgun in the middle of a ski slope and painted it red, and a thirty-year-old poet first shot his young mistress and then himself; when he was discovered in his hotel room in Paris, his toenails were painted red and a cross was tattooed on one of his soles. Few leap out of windows, although several leap off bridges into rivers, and some rivers are more popular than others, such as the Seine, for example. I see that one of the people who drowned in the Seine was Paul Celan, the author of the collection of poetry on my mother’s shelf, which I still have in my jacket pocket. The Roman poet Petronius slit his wrists and then bandaged them again in order to delay his death so that he could listen to his friend reciting poems about life. Sleeping pills also feature as a way of enabling people to sleep longer than usual in hotel rooms, for eternity you might say.

  I note with interest that women apply other methods, focusing more on gas ovens in the kitchen or exhaust fumes in sealed garages after a few shots of vodka.

  I also notice that it’s the women who are more prone to leaving farewell notes, they write a few lines: For my lover, returning to his wife and say of themselves: As for me, I am a watercolor. I wash off. Virginia Woolf left a love letter to her husband before she filled her pockets with stones and walked into the River Ouse. I don’t think two people could have been happier, she wrote. Other farewells were simple, such as the poet who jumped off a boat in the Gulf of Mexico exclaiming: Goodbye, everybody!

  What strikes me is the fact that these men and women were generally younger than me, by as much as two decades. The years before or after thirty are the most difficult. One decides to end it at the age of thirty-two and another at thirty-three, both novelists; there is also a thirty-four-year-old painter; Mayakovsky reaches the age of thirty-six; Pavese was forty-one. Turning thirty-seven is difficult for an artist and not everyone overcomes that hurdle. Musicians are even younger: Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, and Jim Morrison were all twenty-seven years old. I’ve passed the dying age of artists.

  Other laws apply when you’re just ordinary.

  About to turn forty-nine

  Male

  Divorced

  Heterosexual

  Powerless

  With no sex life

  A handyman*

  A scar is an abnormal skin formation that has grown around a wound or lesion

  Svanur stands on the chequered kitchen floor in his socks and his “Shit Happens” T-shirt and ties his apron.

  I watch him slip on red oven mitts, open the oven, cautiously pull out the rack with the baking mould, and stick a needle thermometer into the cake.

  “Another seven minutes,” he says, before pouring cream into a bowl and plugging in the mixer. He turns his back to me as he concentrates on the task. Once he has whipped the cream, he rinses the whisks and sticks them into the dishwasher.

  I consider the right moment to raise the issue of the rifle.

  While he is scooping the cream out of the bowl with a spatula, he says he has noticed a certain restlessness in Aurora’s soul.

  He still has his back turned to me.

  “You never know what a woman is thinking. They betray nothing on the surface, then suddenly they make a decision and tell you they don
’t love you anymore. Like they’ve secretly been changing.”

  He takes the cake out of the oven, frees it from the mould, cuts a slice, and then meticulously examines the wound to ensure it is fully baked. Once that’s done, he cautiously places the slice on my plate with the pastry server, propped up by his stubby fingers.

  He seems anxious and wants to know if there were any signs in the air before Gudrún left me.

  I give this some thought.

  “She told me I repeated everything she said.”

  He is flabbergasted.

  “Repeated, how do you mean?”

  “Yeah, she told me that when she said something to me, I would answer by repeating what she’d just said. For example, by changing an affirmation into a question.”

  Svanur’s face is one big question mark.

  I explain.

  “When she said, ‘Waterlily phoned,’ then I would answer, ‘Yeah, Waterlily phoned?’ That’s called repetition, she said.”

  Svanur looks at me as if I’d proposed a new theory on the laws of black hole physics and time.

  “Isn’t it okay to repeat?” he asks hesitantly.

  “No, Gudrún didn’t think so.”

  “And what should one say—instead of repeating?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Did you ask her not to leave?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  He grabs a milk carton from the fridge, pours two glasses, and pushes one over to me. My mother sometimes saves a glass of milk for me with a slice of brown-butter layer cake with white buttercream on a plate on her beside table; the milk is lukewarm out of the steel flask that is actually meant for coffee, I know the taste.

  We are both silent.

  Then my neighbour picks up the thread.

  “Now you’re a womaniser.”