I liked to be left in peace when I was his age. When he reemerges from under the bed I fetch a glass of water and hand it to him. He drinks the water and then heads straight for the desk, eases himself onto the chair, grabs the black pencil and draws a streak across the sheet. Then another streak and a third streak until the page is full of black strokes and a black cluster has formed in the middle. I watch him. Once he has filled the sheet with darkness, he rips the drawing to shreds and throws it on the floor. I place another sheet in front of him. He looks at the box of colours and hesitates a moment before he reaches for the red and attacks the sheet. He doesn’t look up until he’s finished the work. This drawing is like the previous one, except it’s red. The world is a blazing fire.
I nod.
He pushes the box of colours away, his day’s work is done, and he positions himself by the toolbox. He wants to turn to real work. Show me what he’s made of.
LIMBO
In the evening I go back to Restaurant Limbo. Normally it’s the same dish two days in a row, but now the owner has added a new one and offers me a choice.
“We’ve expanded the menu,” he says, and asks if I’d like soup with dumplings or stew like yesterday. I go for the soup.
I’ve noticed that he, like other people in the town, frequently talks in the first person plural. But I have yet to spot another staff member or customer in this place.
The soup with little dumplings floating in it arrives after a brief wait.
The owner behaves as he did last time, standing by the table as I eat with a dish towel draped over his shoulder. Then the monologue begins. He starts off by telling me what I’ve been doing and says he’s heard that I’ve chatted with the actress and that I’ve been seen on the soccer field and that he’s also heard I didn’t follow the path to the beach.
The next thing he says is that he sees I’ve shaved. He also hasn’t failed to notice that I’m wearing the same red shirt and to draw the conclusion that I need a change of clothes. He says he can pull a few strings and talk to the owner of a shop down the street.
“The problem is that it’s closed, but not really closed,” he says.
The owner has a small stockroom, but one has to phone him to place an order. How many shirts do I need and what else apart from shirts? A belt?
If, on the other hand, I need a suit, he knows a guy who knows a guy who knows another guy who can tailor a suit for me out of the best material. He himself has a tailor-made jacket. He’s in his shirt, but his jacket is on a hanger in the cloakroom by the entrance. He fetches the jacket and puts it on. As he’s about to show me the lining, a revolver flashes in the inside pocket. He swiftly removes the jacket again and hangs it on a hook.
“It would be nice to wake up without having killed anyone,” he says as he adjusts the jacket.
After a moment’s thought, he adds:
“You just don’t know if the truce will last.”
I notice a photograph of a young married couple hanging on the wall. It occurs to me that the reception must have been held here. I have no recollection of photographs being taken at my and Gudrún’s wedding. We got married in a cold spring rain and she wore a light blue dress. It was open in the back and I thought that was beautiful.
I ask him about the photograph:
“My daughter,” he says, turning away to dab the corners of his eyes with the dish towel.
Then the report continues. In addition to wandering alone on the beach, he says he has heard I’ve taken on additional odd jobs for the siblings at Hotel Silence.
I give nothing away about that.
“We heard that you have black tape,” he said, “and can fix anything.”
Judging by his expression, he’d like me to confirm this. He says that he’s heard I fix lamps.
“So you do electrical things as well, not only plumbing.”
“It’s temporary,” I say.
After the soup he wants me to have coffee and pulls up a chair to sit opposite me at the table. He wants me to work for him and brings up the swinging doors he had mentioned the other day.
“Wing doors,” he reiterates.
It transpires that he has been working on a new drawing, a new version of the doors.
“With measurements,” he says.
He pulls a sheet out of his breast pocket, carefully unfolds it, brushes the crumbs off the table with his hand, and places the drawing in front of me. I notice that he has drawn in shadowing and scribbled numbers.
He says he’s improved the quality of the drawing, as he puts it.
I ask if he’s managed to procure the tools. He says he’s working on it.
“What tools were they again?” he asks gingerly. It’s obvious from his expression that he hasn’t fully grasped the concept of this project, so I turn the sheet around and indicate that I want to draw. He doesn’t want me to ruin his original work, so he gets me a new sheet and I sketch out various tools with the ballpoint pen marked “Hotel Silence.”
He nods.
Then he wants to draw.
It takes some time, during which I glance around. No sign of the cat.
He pushes the paper over to me. He seems to have drawn a pipe wrench and a roll of sealing tape.
And he adds:
“There is a leaking sink.”
The next time I come he says he’s going to offer me meat in a sauce with prunes.
“Old recipe. Speciality. From my grandmother.”
He dabs the corners of his eyes with the dish towel again. Before I leave, I place some banknotes on the table and tell him I need two shirts.
The following evening the shirts lie folded on the table. One is chequered white like the dish towel, the kind bankers wear, and the other is pink.
The earth was formless and empty
The boy, on schedule to start the day’s work, sits at the table and opens the drawing pad. Over the following days he fills one sheet after another with similar drawings, sometimes in black, sometimes in red. The drawing pad follows him between rooms and he gets straight down to work, searches for a table to draw on, hoists himself onto a chair, and begins. The drawings are like the scribbles of a young child, bonfires and sparkling flames. In addition to darkness. In the evenings, he takes the pad up to his room with the black and red pencils. The other colours he leaves behind.
On the fourth day he draws a horizontal line right across the sheet, just above the middle. There can be no doubt that it’s a horizon. Then he draws a circle on the upper half of the page, strikingly perfect, as if the child had used a compass. The world is split in two and for that purpose two colours are used, red and black. The sun is ink black and the earth below is ablaze with fire.
Eventually the pencils are reduced to two little black and red stubs, and ultimately just a thread of colour, and finally they’re finished. There is no choice but to broaden the palette. The boy gets a new sheet, turns the box of pencils upside down, and contemplates the colours, looking for the right ones. He first chooses blue and draws a small circle. We stand side by side, the mother and the man with the drill, and observe the creation of a newborn world. Then the boy stoops over the drawing again, obstructing our view with his shoulder—he doesn’t want to be watched and doesn’t look up for a good while because he’s too busy with the picture. When he straightens up again, he has drawn four thin lines coming out of the circle. There can be no question that it’s a tiny person with arms and legs that he has drawn.
“Me,” he says.
“Him,” she interprets.
The boy studies the box of pencils, reaches for orange, and immediately starts to draw another circle, bigger than the previous one. He adds four strokes to it, two horizontal and two vertical; another bigger human being is born and fills the sheet.
“Mom” is heard from the table.
To perfect the drawing he adds several smaller strokes, like rays, he counts five fingers on each hand and draws them carefully. He has connected the two people, they’re ho
lding hands.
He has created two people, a small man and a big woman, and placed them under a green sun. It’s the first day of the world.
And he looked at what he had made and saw that it was very good.
His mother smiles at me. The more I try to forget that she is a woman, the more I think about it.
And there was day
The boy is generally never far away.
“Have you seen Adam?” she asks. She is bending over some papers with numbers, accounts, I assume. The boy had been playing near his mom and then suddenly vanished, evaporated.
“He was here a second ago.”
She rushes down the corridor. I hear her calling out the boy’s name. I put down my screwdriver and follow her.
“There’s no point in calling him, he doesn’t answer,” she says. She opens the door of a cupboard in the corridor.
“He sometimes crawls in here,” she says, and adds that the last time she found him behind bundles of clean bed linen and towels.
As we move between rooms, she says she is always afraid of losing Adam. She opens one bedroom door after the next and swiftly scans each room. We also look in the bathrooms and search through wardrobes and under beds.
“He crawls under tables, beds, and vanishes into nooks,” his mother explains. “He’s always looking for hiding places and I’m so scared he’ll get trapped, find some place he can’t get out of on his own.”
She kneels and looks under the bed.
When she stands up, she brushes down her skirt.
“He’s not with Fifi,” she says. “I don’t get it.”
We look on both floors. Finally, she knocks on the door of the man in the leopard socks.
She signals me to wait outside.
“Wait,” she says. “I’ll do this.”
I stand at some distance in the corridor and, after a few moments, the man opens a small slit in the door. I hear her apologise for the inconvenience and ask if he’s seen the little boy. Whether he might have come by? They exchange some words and then she disappears into the bedroom, out of my line of view. I hear a conversation and May speaks in fast, hushed tones, but I can’t make out what is being said.
After a short while she comes out holding the boy’s hand. The edges of his mouth are smudged in brown.
“He was with him,” she says with a grave air. “He gave him chocolate,” she adds by way of explanation.
And then in a low voice: “Thank you for your help.”
She bites her lower lip and confesses she isn’t just afraid for Adam, but also for her brother. “Young people like to meet out in the woods and few are willing to go out there to fetch their remains.” Those are the words the young woman uses, “young people,” like my eighty-three-year-old mother would say.
Once the mother and son have gone back to their room, I knock on my neighbour’s door.
“You don’t go near that boy,” I say.
He looks at me and grins.
“Do you have a crush on the girl? I thought you were getting off with the movie star.”
I’ve no intention of answering him, but he indicates that he has matters to discuss, that he was looking for me, in fact.
Then he immediately gets to the point and asks if I’ve managed to see the mural.
He doesn’t wait for an answer and asks straight out whether I would like to work for him.
“To obtain certain things.”
“What things?”
He sips from the glass he is holding in his hands.
“Things you have access to. People trust a person like you, who can bathe in the sunshine of a good conscience.”
I am like other people; I love, cry, and suffer
I’ve become a member of the Hotel Silence staff and have a bunch of keys.
Fifi calls me over and hands me the bundle.
“Since you are now a member of the Hotel Silence staff, we feel you should have the keys.”
In return I can stay at the hotel for an unlimited period of time, with breakfast, lunch, and goods from the hotel shop—“while the stock still lasts,” as Fifi puts it. I’m also welcome to bring my family later, says May. Fifi makes soup or an omelette at lunchtime, and in the evenings I more often than not go to the restaurant down the road. I have helped the owner with a number of odd jobs and haven’t had to pull out my wallet recently. For some reason he hasn’t mentioned the swinging doors since last week. When I get back to the hotel, I read. Yesterday I finished A Cold Spring by Elizabeth Bishop and started Fathers and Sons by Turgenev. I also look in on Fifi in the baths every day and offer him guidance on the tiling.
“It’s good to get an outsider’s eye,” he says. “Maybe I should go to school to learn this properly.”
His sister and I take a bedroom a day, and help each other to get them into shape. Then she also needs to take care of her boy.
Sometimes May stops whatever she is doing to watch me work. I also sometimes look up and notice that she is looking at me through the mirror, I observe her observing me. When I look up, she looks away. Or she is on the verge of saying something when she suddenly stops in the middle of a sentence. At times she also looks without seeing, then I know she is thinking of something else. Then she stands dead still and stares into space with vacant eyes. After some moments she snaps out of it and says:
“Sorry, I was thinking.”
Then there are times when she looks at me like she can’t figure out who I am and is trying to work out where I belong in her black-and-white world of dust. It comes to a head when she confronts me for the third time.
I’m helping her to stretch some sheets, we’re both tugging in opposite directions and tuck the corners under the mattress.
“No one comes here on vacation,” she says, staring me in the eye.
I straighten up. I’m standing on one side of the bed and she on the other.
She wants to know what I’m doing here. Apart from helping her with the sheets.
If we were to sit down, me and this young woman in pink sneakers, and compare our scars, our maimed bodies, and count how many stitches had been sewn from the neck down and then draw a line between them and add them all up, she would be the winner. My scratches are insignificant, laughable. Even if I had lance wounds in my side, the girl would win the prize.
“No one travels here without some purpose,” she repeats.
The same thing the man in the socks said.
I haven’t spotted him for several days. Didn’t he say he had some business to attend to in the country?
“The world is full of men like you who misunderstand life,” he’d said to me the last time I bumped into him.
Even I was beginning to doubt my purpose.
Before I know it, I’ve said it.
“I actually came to die.”
She looks straight at me.
“Are you ill or …?”
“No.”
I sense she wants more information.
“To die how?”
“To kill myself. I haven’t decided how yet.”
“I understand.”
I don’t know what she understands.
Should I mention that there are people in this world who want to die because they can’t bear what happens anymore? That would be the longest sentence I’d have uttered in two weeks.
“Why didn’t you just stay at home?”
She doesn’t ask whether it wouldn’t be better to die surrounded by cold mountains.
“I wanted to protect my daughter from discovering me.”
“And not me?” she asks. “You don’t want to protect me?”
“Forgive me,” I say. “I didn’t know you would be here. Or the boy. I didn’t expect to meet you. I didn’t know you then,” I add, feeling the triviality of every word I utter.
I can’t tell this young woman, who owns nothing but life itself, that I’m lost. Or that life turned out to be different than what I expected. If I were to say: I’m like other people, I love, cry
, and suffer, she would probably understand me and say: I know what you mean.
“I was unhappy,” I say.
That’s the second time I mention that, if I include Mom.
“I didn’t know how to fix it,” I add.
I can almost hear Mom’s voice. “All suffering is unique and different,” she said once, “and therefore it can’t be compared. Happiness, on the other hand, is similar.”
May stares at the floor.
“Adam’s father was an economist who played in a jazz band. Adam was born in the basement of a stranger’s house and I was alone there with his father. We both cried. Such a beautiful angel who had fallen from the sky, his father said.”
She falls silent, walks over to the window and then continues. Searches for words and chooses them carefully:
“He was shot out on the soccer field and we couldn’t reach him. Not even to collect the body because he lay in a fighting zone. We didn’t get to hold him, wash him, bury him. We saw him through binoculars, the trickles of blood down his trouser legs and jacket sleeves. We thought he was dead, but the next day he had changed position. At first he lay on his back and the next day he lay on his side, in the evening he had crawled two metres towards the goalposts. I would never have believed so much blood could come from one person. It took him three days to die. After that he lay still and we watched him shrivel into his clothes until we were forced to flee and leave him behind.”
“Forgive me,” I say again.
Should I tell her I don’t understand myself, would that not just make it worse?
She is sitting on the chair and I walk to her and sit beside her.
“Sorrow is like a piece of glass in the throat,” she says.
“I’m not going to die. Not immediately,” I say.
I could just as well have said, don’t worry because I don’t know how to die. No more than Mom can. Or I could say to this girl, who has looked down the barrels of so many guns and survived, that I’m not the same man I was ten days ago. Or yesterday. That I’m in a state of flux.
“Dad, did you know that the body’s cells renew themselves every seven years,” Waterlily had said.
Hotel Silence Page 11
