Hotel Silence

by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir

  “In some cases a birth can signify a death.”

  “I see.”

  “But it doesn’t necessarily have to be a physical death, but rather much more the end of one thing and the beginning of another.” She finishes the cup of cocoa and we both slip into a silence. Then she turns to me:

  “What about you, Dad, don’t you dream?”

  “No, I don’t actually.”

  “Doesn’t the son of an organ player ever dream of organ music?”

  I smile at her.

  “No, not even organ music.”

  Once she has finished putting on her parka, she remembers something.

  “No, the problem is,” she says as she adjusts the elastic in her hair, “that a cupboard door came off its hinges in the kitchen and fell, breaking a tile on the floor. Any chance of you taking a look at it for me?”

  Waterlily rents a small apartment with a female friend of hers, and when they moved in, I sandpapered their kitchen cabinets, varnished them, and changed the handles. I also installed a shower instead of the old bathtub and placed tiles around it.

  “Sure, no problem,” I say.

  I do what the three Gudrúns in my life ask me to do. I put up mirrors and shelves and carry furniture from place to place and put it down wherever they tell me. I have tiled seven bathrooms and installed five kitchen units, I can lay a parquet floor, and I’ve smashed double-glazed windows with a sledgehammer. I’m not a man who destroys things, however, but rather one who fixes things that are broken. If someone asks me why I do what I do, I answer that a woman asked me to.

  I wrap my arms around my daughter and embrace her.

  I intend to say something else to her but instead say:

  “Did you know that humans are the only animals who cry?”

  She smiles from ear to ear.

  “No, I didn’t know that. I thought we were the only animals who laugh.”

  When I get home I scan through the bookshelves looking for the book on the interpretation of dreams. Gudrún hasn’t taken it with her because I find it on the same shelf as the manual on repairing teak furniture.

  I look up organ.

  To dream that one hears beautiful organ music is a sign of sexual energy and virility, the book claims.

  “Dad, don’t believe everything you think,” Waterlily had said as we parted.

  A ticket to the moon, one way

  The neighbourhood sinks into silence. But for the sound of a bird.

  The question is where do I want to go.

  I surf the Web in search of a suitable destination and focus on countries along warfare latitudes. Sixty-three countries and regions soon emerge as potential candidates. What was the country that Svanur mentioned in connection with the documentary he had watched about women and war?

  In the end, I choose a country that was in the news for a long time because of the battles being waged there, but has vanished from the spotlight due to a cease-fire a few months ago. The situation is said to be precarious, and it is unclear whether the cease-fire will hold. It seems ideal, I could be shot on a street corner or step on a land mine. It’s as if I could hear Svanur’s voice:

  “If you were a woman, you’d be raped first.”

  It will be a one-way ticket. I find a hotel online in some derelict small town I recognise from the news. I remember that hotels are, in fact, favoured venues for topping one’s self. The online photos were clearly taken before the war, and one can see that the hotel once stood by a little square adorned with flowers, and that bee breeding and honey production thrived in the surrounding countryside. The hotel is situated close to the beach, and according to the information on the website, it was a popular tourist resort, known for its archaeological sites and mud baths. There is mention of thermal baths in the hotel and a centuries-old mosaic wall.

  As I’m writing a farewell letter, I slip a record onto the turntable and listen to “One Way Ticket to the Moon.”

  Who should I address it to? To my daughter and mother, the two namesakes, Gudrún W. and Gudrún S.?

  I start to think about what Svanur said on the walk.

  “People are forgotten. Eventually no one remembers you.”

  Waterlily has immaculate skin, but is worried that she doesn’t have beautiful enough knees. Should I tell her not to worry about her knees? Men don’t give any thought to knees, they don’t think about women in parts, but in overall pictures. Do they do that? I think of my own intimate diaries.

  Mom has already made arrangements regarding the flora on her grave. She wants to have low ivy, dwarf willow. Should I write: no pomp, no handles on the coffin, just the cheapest wooden box, raw?

  I make a first draft of the letter and write: I’m gone then. Why then? Cross it out.

  I add: I won’t be coming back. Cross out I won’t be coming back and write I no longer exist. Should I mention the spring? Where could that come in? Suddenly I’d like to insert the words “latter half” into the letter. Could I say: In the latter half of next week I will no longer exist? Or: In the latter half of next week the world will be spinning without me? What’s the weather forecast for the world without me? They’re forecasting mild weather and rain over the next few days. I write: In the latter half of next week it will stop raining. Waterlily will know what I mean.

  Cross everything out.

  Start again:

  I don’t think any real father could have been any prouder than I am. Cross out real and just leave father.

  Rip up the sheet and start again:

  Sold Steel Legs Ltd. to Eiríkur Gudmundsson (yes, it’s the guy who runs the Steel Frame Ltd. company and makes kitchen islands), he’ll transfer the final payment to your account in June. Yours, Dad.

  God saves the sufferers with suffering

  I pack for a corpse. The suitcase is almost empty: no sunscreen, no razor, no change of shirt, no sandals, swimsuit, or shorts, no camera and no phone. It will be impossible to contact me.

  Then I tidy up the apartment a bit.

  I spread the duvet over the double bed and smoothen it slightly, then draw the bedspread over the bedclothes and tug on the corners on both sides to even them out. Should I vacuum as well? I open the wardrobe. Is that really the sweater Gudrún knitted for me, folded at the very back of the shelf?

  I adjust the pile of books on the bedside table. What’s the Bible still doing there? The bookmark is still on the Book of Job.

  After Gudrún and I stopped sharing our nights together, and she lay on one side of the bed, wrapped in down with her book, and I lay on the other side with mine, I read three books that no one I know has managed to read from beginning to end: the Bible, the Koran, and the Vedas. It took me three months to read the Bible, a total of 1,829 pages, but a shorter time to read the others. My favourites were the love verses of the apostle Paul and the Koran’s messages of peace. For he who murders one man murders all mankind; he who saves a human life saves mankind. And I liked Purusha in the Vedas with his thousand heads, thousand eyes and thousand legs, who held the entire world in his embrace.

  Only on one occasion did Gudrún ask me to read to her. By then she was dressing our duvets in nonmatching covers and building a barricade of pillows between us, like a fortified wall between the east and west banks of the marital bed.

  “Which part would you like me to read?” I asked.

  “Just where you are now.”

  I was in the Book of Job so I read about the righteous Job, blameless and upright, God-fearing and scrupulous, who was imprisoned in chains and afflicted with suffering.

  Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return, I end my reading.

  “Thanks,” she said softly, and I sensed a vulnerability in her voice. Then I heard her say, “I knew it,” as she shook the pillow between us and turned away. I looked at her beautiful curved shoulder under her nightdress. If I had been on the Song of Songs and read your breasts are like bunches of grapes I’d probably still be a married man.

  A
short while later she had to go to the bathroom and when she came back, she said:

  “The tap is leaking.”

  The next day there was a note on the kitchen table that read:

  “A bulb blew in the hallway.”

  In this way we met halfway; I passed on suffering to her, she assigned me chores.

  I could proclaim the world till dusk There is something everywhere

  When I’ve washed the plate, dried it, and put it back into the cupboard, I wipe the drainboard and hang the dish cloth.

  I open all the windows.

  I close all the windows.

  Once I’ve finished making the double bed, I lie on the sofa for two hours and try to think of nothing. Is there anything, I ask myself, that can still surprise me in life? The evil of man? No, my knowledge of human cruelty is complete. Human kindness? No, I have met enough good men to believe in man. The immeasurable beauty of mountaintops, multiple layers of landscape, mountains behind mountains, multiple blues on blue? Endless black sand beaches and glistening glaciers in the east, the outline of a thousand-year dream that moves slowly, as if it were under a sheet of plexiglass? I know all that. Is there something I still long to experience? Nothing I can think of. I have held a newborn slimy red baby, chopped down a Christmas tree in the woods in December, taught a child to ride a bike, changed a tire up on a mountain road alone at night in a snowstorm, braided my daughter’s hair, driven through a polluted valley full of factories abroad, rattled in the rear carriage of a small train, boiled potatoes on a Primus in a coal-black sand desert, wrestled with the truth under long and short shadows, and I know that a man both cries and laughs, that he suffers and loves, that he possesses a thumb and writes poems, and I know that a man knows that he is mortal.

  What’s left? To hear the chirp of a nightingale? To eat a white dove?

  As the taxi waits outside, I turn back at the doorstep and fetch a few tools. There is no telling what circumstances I might land in, I might need to put up a hook. I also take an extension cord and transformer, which is when I realise I may as well take the small toolbox, the one with the rechargeable drill. Before shutting the door, I grab the photograph of Waterlily from the bedside table. She is five years old with a thin pigtail and swollen gums, having just lost her front teeth. The photograph was taken at a camping site by a lagoon on the tail of a glacier, and she is stretching five fingers up to the sky, with a turquoise iceberg in the background. As I pass the trash cans, it occurs to me that someone could dig my diaries out of the garbage and read my confessions, Apologia pro Vita Sua. The journals are clearly marked Jónas Ebeneser Snæland. Why do I identify myself with Mom’s surname? I roll the notebooks together and stick them into my jacket pocket.

  They’ll go into the first trash can I find abroad.

  I’m off then.

  To a meeting with myself.

  And my last day.

  I say goodbye to everything.

  The crocus have opened.

  I leave nothing behind.

  I move from the all-enveloping light into the darkness.

  What is now

  ends now

  I doze off on the plane and dream of a sheep licking my ear and wake up just before landing.

  The plane dives through the clouds.

  I glide.

  I glide.

  I glide to the earth close to the salty sea.

  I manage to make out a flat terrain, fields, endless forests, and dead-still lakes like mirrors in the landscape. The shadow of the steel wing stretches over a field to the edge of a forest. The runway embraces me at full speed; I’ve landed. Trees with foliage appear close to the windows. I peer out at the horizon, at the seam between the woods and the sky. This is where I’ll go and no farther.

  I give myself a week to finish the job.

  I am a forest and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses

  A man in a waist jacket stands by the exit holding up a sheet of paper with two names: “Mister Jónas” has been written with a red marker on the top of the page and below it is a female name. We are the only two passengers the hotel has come to collect and we share the back seat of the taxi. The woman sits behind the driver, wearing sunglasses despite the cloudy sky. It’s a dusty old cab with ripped upholstery, I feel the springs pressing against my back, the seat belt is torn.

  “Married” is the first word to come out of the cabbie’s mouth as he nods at us, first looking at me for confirmation, and then at the woman, which is when I realise that it’s a question. The woman shakes her head and says something to the driver in their language. She is in a blue jacket and skirt with a foulard around her neck and she leans forward slightly, holding onto the front seat as if she were posing for a picture in a photo studio. I’ve never travelled far enough from home not to be able to understand a single word that is being spoken, never far enough not to be able to understand the waiter who is handing me a beer, or he me.

  Hotel Silence stands by the shore, an hour’s drive from the airport, but the driver explains that the roads are still a mess and that we have to take a detour through the city, which will prolong our journey by half an hour. Parts of the route haven’t been mapped, he says. There are some hills in the distance, but otherwise the country is flat.

  The first thing I notice is grey dust over everything, like a layer of ash after a volcanic eruption. Apart from the red streak stretching across the afternoon sky, we are driving into a black-and-white film set.

  The driver confirms my feeling.

  “Dust is the worst,” he says. “Breathing in the dust. We are waiting for rain. Then it will all turn into mud, of course. The rain brings dampness too.”

  I notice he adjusts the mirror every time he addresses us, to have us both in view. He drives with his right hand, while his left hand lies motionless in his lap. When he is pointing at something, he takes his hand off the wheel altogether and the car swerves on the road.

  I spot the fragment of an old town wall.

  “Once there were ancient Roman ruins here, now it’s just ordinary ruins,” I hear him say. “It will take us fifty years to build up the country again. The refugees won’t come back while things are still a mess,” he continues. “And we don’t get tourists anymore. We are no longer on the news. We are forgotten. We no longer exist.”

  He says the hotel was closed for many months and that it’s quite significant that he’s now driven three guests there in the same week. That’s in total, including us, he says, holding up three fingers and the car swerves.

  We don’t pass a single undamaged building. The man points and provides commentary: the House of Parliament was destroyed, as were the museum and the TV station, which are in ruins, the National Archive and its manuscripts was also razed to the ground, and the Museum of Modern Art was blown up. “Here there used to be a school, there a library, there a university, here there was a bakery, here a cinema,” he continues.

  Destruction lies everywhere.

  High apartment blocks have been blown apart and there is an obvious shortage of glass in the windows of the walls that are still standing. I think to myself: You have your derelict, crumbling houses, we have our boulders that crack open with molten rock flowing through them like streams.

  We slowly meander through the city, the few people about look pale and weary. In some places machinery is working in the ruins. There are widespread traces of the prosperity people enjoyed before the war. We stop at a crossroads, just beside a two-storey house with a missing facade, like a dollhouse. Although everything is covered in a thick layer of dust, I distinguish a patterned carpet on the floor and the remains of a piano. I’m transfixed by a deep armchair and footrest by a famous designer. Beside the armchair there is a lampstand and an overturned bookshelf. I notice the bed has been made in the room, someone has drawn a white blanket over the double bed just before abandoning the house, perhaps the person popped out to the bakery for some buns and got shot o
n the way. What draws my attention the most, though, is an unbroken yellow vase on a shelf in the living room. The wreck of a station wagon lies in the garage and a red tricycle stands in the driveway.

  Garbage is scattered everywhere and, as far as I can make out, the sewage pipes have been unearthed. The driver apologises that it is impossible to roll up the window on my side. Apart from the pungent smell from outside and the strong odour of the driver’s Fahrenheit aftershave, I catch a faint, sweet flowery scent from the woman, totally different than Gudrún’s. What was the name of that perfume she wore again? Wasn’t she the companion of stars, with Pluto behind her ears? The woman silently stares at the road between the front seats.

  “Developers,” says the driver, nodding towards some giant Caterpillar excavators. “After the air raids, the peacekeeping forces arrived,” he continues. “Then they and the contractors started showing up with their machinery.” He takes his hand off the wheel to adjust the mirror yet again. His eyes are now aimed at me.

  He wants to know what I’m doing in this place.

  “Vacation,” I say.

  They both stare at me, the man and the woman. I notice them exchanging a glance in the mirror. The man says something I don’t understand to the woman, then they look at me again and nod. I observe them.

  He rephrases his question and asks if I’m on a special mission, like the man he had driven to the hotel earlier in the week.

  I repeat that I’m on vacation and they ask no more questions.

  We move away from the city, driving up twisted country roads with woodlands on both sides. I notice that the tree trunks are grey, it’s as if a large part of the trees in the forest have been unable to leaf or flower.

  On the outskirts of the forest there is a field where the driver slows down, lifting his hand from the wheel to point, causing the car to zigzag along the road.

  “Graves, unmarked mass graves,” he says, including a famous national poet who wrote a poem about a desolate forest.