Hotel Silence

by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir

  I seem to make amends by inviting the fifth girl on a drive and mountain hike.

  G was wearing a yellow turtleneck and white sneakers.

  And, as usual, I detail the shopping list: On the way we stopped at a shop and I bought prawn salad sandwiches, two Cokes, and two Prince Polo chocolate bars.

  In the car on the way to the crater I tell G that Dad died this winter and that I dropped out of school to take over the family company, Steel Legs Ltd. I tell her that I live with Mom and have one older brother. I also tell her I intend to become a father one day. (Why did I say that? I felt I had to say that.) I tell her about some of the things that have happened in the past and also more recently, which explain my way of thinking and feeling today. This is followed by a sentence that I’ve underlined twice: I spoke and G was silent.

  Then there are five lines of text that I scribbled over and that are totally illegible until the mountain reappears:

  G started to betray doubts when she saw the mountain rise above us and all the rocks. I walked ahead and she followed in my footsteps and I could feel her breath on my neck. It was foggy and difficult to find the top rock. We waited for the mist to clear so that I could offer G a glimpse of the glacier to the east. We did it on the way back. It had rained and the moss was wet and we didn’t take off any more clothes than necessary. It was slightly more complicated for her because she was wearing some kind of dungarees. I heard the flutter of a ptarmigan nearby and thought: What does a bird see, what does a bird think? A sheep was suddenly standing beside us and staring and I told G to close her eyes.

  And I thought, what does a sheep see, what does a sheep think? As we were putting our clothes back on, G said, “Imagine if an eruption were to start underneath us.”

  On the way back to the car, we took a shortcut across an arctic tern nesting area.

  Thousands of arctic terns.

  A choir of a thousand voices.

  There I threw up my prawn salad sandwich.

  Because I was feeling weak, G offered to drive back into town and I lay on the backseat. G talked and I was silent. She told me about her mother and her nursing course and how difficult it was to find a good vein to stick a needle into. On the way she stopped the car on one occasion and explained that there were some young ptarmigans on the road.

  Then the account peters out. I’m at the bottom of the mountain again. Or that’s what it says in clear letters: I’ve reached the foot of the mountain. I turn the page and the next entry is a month later, when I visit G.

  July 7.

  Met G again at her and her mother’s home. Saw her completely naked for the first time (not just in portions). It was impossible to lock the bedroom door so I had to drag a chest of drawers in front of it. Before I left she told me she was expecting a baby.

  I asked her how that could have happened and she answered that condoms aren’t foolproof.

  I was still growing up and I was expecting a child. I lived with Mom and slept in a single bed with a linen drawer I got as a confirmation gift. The report on what my flesh produced on my behalf ends with two sentences on the next page: A baby was conceived on the mountain witnessed by a sheep. A few feet away from a dormant crater.

  A baby was conceived on the mountain witnessed by a sheep

  All of a sudden Gudrún had knit me a sweater and I thought, we’ve become a couple. She handed it to me, ironed and folded, and said, “It matches your eyes.” Then she started knitting a rib stitch for the baby. We sat on the sofa at her place in the evenings, watched TV and ate popcorn with her mother. I’d spent four summers on my uncle’s sheep farm and knew what was in store for her, I had lambing experience, had dragged out their slimy bodies. I remember I tried to bring a horned ram into the world, to get the horns past the canal, I can still hear the mother’s bleating.

  A little over eight months after the mountain hike, Gudrún Waterlily was born on an intercalary day, two weeks before her time and with soft nails. As was to be expected, the baby lay crosswise in the womb and could not be turned, so a caesarean was performed. I was terrified when the midwife approached me with the child, she taught me how to create a shell around the tiny body, I held a life in my hands, the most fragile creature in the world, and I thought, she’ll outlive me.

  I skip to the last pages in the book until I find the following sentence:

  February 29. She will outlive me. Eyelids like transparent butterfly wings.

  Then I had to pop into work after lunch to handle an order. Why did I do that? Because a man called to tell me he’d be collecting his order at one-thirty.

  I was the first of my friends to tie the knot, which meant regular sex at home, I had access to a female body every night. I quickly got used to it. Initially, after the birth, Gudrún wanted to choose the parts of her body I had access to. I wasn’t allowed to hold her stomach, I wasn’t allowed to go near her C-section scar. “Put your hand here,” she said. “No, not like that, keep it still, don’t move or breathe so heavily.” I tried to hold onto her shoulders or to let my hands rest on her rib cage right under her breasts, but sometimes I forgot the things I wasn’t allowed to do, groping my way, searching for a path to follow along her naked flesh, and my hands slid down to her tummy.

  “What?” she would then say.

  “Nothing,” I answered.

  “No, because you’re holding my tummy.”

  Twenty-six years later my wife tells me: “Waterlily isn’t yours. I felt it was right that you should know, since we’re breaking up.” And then she adds: “I’d never met a guy who spoke about suffering and death on a first date. When you said we all die I felt that was something to build a life on. That was when I decided that Waterlily would be yours.”

  The last words I write in the diary are undated.

  I am flesh.

  After that I stopped keeping a record of my life.

  By flesh I mean everything below my head. This is consistent with the fact that flesh is the beginning and end of all the most important things in my life: I was born and the heart and lungs started their relentless work, a child was born and I shouldered the responsibility of the flesh of my flesh, and soon my body will cease to work. It’s as if I could hear Mom lecturing me on the order of the world: “You know, Jónas, the big story started long before we were born.”

  Wounds heal at different speeds and the scars that are formed can lie at varying depths, some are deeper than others

  It’s a quarter past two in the morning and someone is knocking on my door on the fourth floor, first lightly, then more insistently.

  Svanur stands on the landing, out of breath, and glances over my shoulder. The front door downstairs should be locked, but he said that he slipped in behind a neighbour who was coming home from a binge. He has been unable to sleep and, looking at my place, thought he could see some movement behind the blinds in my attic, someone walking about, and came to the conclusion that I was awake as well. He wants to invite me for a walk with his dog, who is waiting by the caravan downstairs.

  Big girl, he calls his bitch.

  Can I tell him I have other plans at this time of night?

  Suddenly he has stepped into my place and entered the living room. He looks around, scanning the space swiftly and methodically. Is he checking me out?

  His gaze freezes on the stool in the middle of the living room floor and the chandelier I’ve placed on the coffee table, but it’s not as if I’m standing there with a belt in my hands.

  I close the computer displaying the page of suicide methods of writers.

  The contents of the box lie in a heap on the dining table.

  “Are you tidying up?” he asks.

  “Yes, I’m going through some old papers.”

  Before I know it, he has vanished into the bathroom. I hear him opening and closing cabinets and, on the way back, he peeps into the bedroom. The rifle is still lying on the double bed. He then opens the coat closet in the corridor, bringing his inspection to an end.

&nb
sp; “I want to understand Aurora better,” says my neighbour with a sigh.

  MAN AND BEAST

  Svanur holds onto the dog by its leash as we walk along a path that leads down to the harbour. The air is so still and there isn’t a soul around at night, apart from a young father with a stroller. Did I take Gudrún Waterlily out for walks at night when she had tummy aches to allow her mom to sleep?

  Svanur breaks the silence.

  “I find these bright nights so difficult,” I hear him say. He bends down to clean up after the dog.

  “You can recognise the types that don’t carry a bag and think they can get away with it.”

  We stand on the pier, halfway between the whale-watching boats and the whale-hunting boats, the vast sky above us.

  “Isn’t that beautiful?” I hear Svanur ask.

  I don’t say anything. A magnificent spring sky with three horizontal orange streaks isn’t powerful enough to provoke any longing in me; I saw the very same sky last year and the year before. I can prolong my existence or I can bring it to an end.

  “We’re so small,” he says, patting the dog. Then he corrects himself:

  “Man is so small.”

  We walk towards the lighthouse and Svanur says he walked the same way yesterday and spotted a seal. And the seal also spotted him. They had looked each other in the eye, man and animal. He wondered whether he should take a picture of the seal with his phone, but decided against it because he said to himself, man and animal, nothing more to say, no deeper meaning. Then, when he got home, he read an article online about a seal that had learned how to use a screwdriver. “Is it a coincidence that I stumbled precisely on that article?” he asks, gazing beyond me, out at the vast green expanse.

  We both fall silent.

  The dog barks and wants to wade into the seaweed, but Svanur tugs on the leash. An arctic tern swirls above us and I wave it away with my hand. The nesting season has begun.

  “Did you know,” he says, still gazing out at the sea, “that humans are the only animals that shed tears to express feelings such as joy or sorrow?”

  I say yes, isn’t that due to the stimulation of the lachrymal gland?

  “Unlike animals, we know that our lives end,” my neighbour continues. “We cease to exist.”

  He looks around for a trash can, but there are none in sight so he holds the bag all the way back.

  As I’m about to say goodbye to Svanur, I sense there is still something weighing on his mind.

  He shuffles his feet in front of the caravan.

  “Did you need ammunition as well?” he asks.

  “Yes.”

  “I suspected as much.”

  He hesitates.

  “Unfortunately it got used up on the ptarmigan hunting last year.”

  He looks beyond me, the dog stares right at me.

  “To be honest, I’ve never handled a shotgun before,” I tell my neighbour.

  “I thought as much. That you don’t know how to fire a gun.”

  He’s right, I can’t fire a gun. Someone else might end up getting shot.

  Then he asks if he can come over every now and then.

  “Is it okay if I come over every now and then?”

  I tell him I’m a bit busy the next few days, but before I know it, I’ve added:

  “I’m about to leave. On a trip.”

  The idea strikes me like a bolt of lightning; I’ll make myself vanish. That way I don’t have to worry about Waterlily discovering my body. Like a bird spinning down a vortex, hovering horizontally for a few metres before it dives and perishes. One final wing flap before aiming for the gaping crevice, the whitened bones will serve as a landmark to travellers.

  As I reflect on this further, however, I exclude the option of not being found; Waterlily would certainly spend her whole life searching for me, and ultimately the pain would be too much of a burden. Instead I would go on a trip abroad and Waterlily and Mom would get me back in a tidy box.

  “Your father has gone on his longest journey,” Mom had said to me. I had just come home from an exam and she was standing in the doorway, waiting for me.

  “Gone where?” I asked, noticing that his brown briefcase was lying in the bed of pansies.

  I took the briefcase into my bedroom, opened it, and arranged the bills on the desk. The next day I told Mom I had quit university and started working at Steel Legs Ltd., Father & Son. Society’s interest in steel legs has been fairly constant over the decades.

  “Don’t worry,” I said to Mom.

  “The best moments in my life,” I hear Svanur say, “are when I’m lying alone inside a sleeping bag up on a heath, holding my rifle at the crack of dawn, waiting for the birds to wake up. Remaining silent and staring at the crust of snow. It’s like being inside a womb. One feels secure. One doesn’t need to be born. One doesn’t need to come out.”

  What did I say to Svanur?

  I repeated what he said. I said no, one doesn’t need to come out. That was the last sentence I spoke to him. Which means that my last word was “out.”

  The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us

  I phone Waterlily and we arrange to meet. She suggests a bakery with two tables and chairs.

  In our last conversation, she’d asked if I sorted my garbage and whether I’d got myself a blue recycling bin for paper. In return I asked how Sigtryggur was doing and she answered: “You mean Tristan, Dad?” and added:

  “That’s over.”

  My daughter doesn’t need a father, but a boyfriend. My function has become obsolete.

  She is wearing the blue hooded parka with fur trim I got her for Christmas and she gives me a broad smile. I remember when she got braces and cried a whole weekend. She takes off her parka and hangs it on the back of the chair.

  My daughter is an expert on marine biology and wrote her final thesis on the damaging effects of plastic on the flora and fauna of the sea, and particularly on the sperm production of men.

  “Perfluoro particles,” she says, and I nod.

  It’s from her that I get all my knowledge of the impact climate change has on ocean acidification and hypoxia.

  Then I remember that when she was small she had a burning interest in flowing water and turned on all the taps. She stood with her chin hanging over the rim of the sink or pulled up a chair, climbed on top of it, and watched the flow.

  “Water runs,” she said when she was two years old.

  She wears her granny’s watch with lots of bracelets over it. They meet every week, the two Gudrúns, granny and the granddaughter, and chat about their worries about warfare and the future of the world.

  My daughter has some cocoa and a Danish pastry, and I have a coffee and a cake called “wedding bliss.”

  “Did you know,” she says, “that last year the world spent 240 thousand billion krónur on weapons and arms?”

  She sips from her cup and wipes the cream off her upper lip.

  “We need to calculate the damage caused by the people who profit from war and make them pay for it,” I hear her continue. “That way they would understand that war is much more expensive than peace. In any case, the only language they understand is money,” she adds.

  My daughter expresses herself with her entire body when she speaks, then she suddenly falls silent.

  “Have you seen your granny?” I ask.

  “Yes, and she agrees with me.”

  “I’ve no doubt she does.”

  We both laugh.

  What kind of a father was I?

  I was never bad to my daughter, never annoyed. I answered her questions and took her to soccer practice and watched her inside goals, with her skinny legs in green socks and her big goalie gloves, diving fearlessly on the ball.

  Answer: I was an average father. Grade: 7.5.

  I think about whether I should tell her that I’m going to embark on my longest journey.

  “What, Dad?” she says. “You’re looking at me in such a weird way.”

>   “Nothing.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, absolutely.”

  I wonder: Does she know? Has her Mom told her?

  She looks at me searchingly.

  “Are you sure everything is okay, Dad?”

  “Yes, everything is fine.”

  “Have you heard from Mom?”

  “No, nothing.”

  “But you’re on good terms?”

  “Yes, everything is fine.”

  She carefully scrutinises me.

  “And you’re not sad?”

  “No, not sad.”

  I then wonder if she will forgive me. Or blame me, hate me even. Will she baptise her son in my name, will he be freckled like his mom, will he be a loner or an explorer?

  “Dad, are you ill?”

  “No, no, nothing like that.”

  She finishes the Danish pastry, collects the crumbs and deposits them on the plate.

  “And you’re not lonely?”

  “No, no.”

  There is something she has to get off her chest.

  “It’s just that I had a dream the other night.”

  She hesitates.

  “I dreamt I was giving birth to a big baby boy.”

  “I see.”

  “And he had an extra big head.”

  Should I tell her I haven’t a clue of how to interpret dreams? She takes a deep breath.

  “The problem was that the baby boy was you.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “The baby in the dream. I was giving birth to my own father.”

  I do my best.

  “Could this mean some new plan?”

  “Yes, I looked it up and a birth can symbolise a rebirth or a new beginning, but also the part of one’s self that is neglected. And the size of the head means that a neglected part of the self requires care and attention.”

  I hesitate.

  “Have you found out what that means?”

  I hear from her breathless voice that she is worried.