Hotel Silence

by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir

  “Yes, isn’t a man constantly in the act of becoming? Always being renewed?” Svanur had asked down at the harbour, by the choppy green ocean, with the whale-watching boats on one side of the pier and the whale-hunting boats on the other.

  “We’re born, love, suffer, and die,” I hear her say with a long sniff.

  “I know,” I say.

  “Some of my friends didn’t get a chance to try love,” she continues. “Only to suffer and die.”

  I nod.

  “Even if we didn’t know if we were going to get shot today or tomorrow, we never stopped loving.”

  She is standing again, by the window with her back turned to me. Her tight blouse clinging to her shoulders.

  “We kept the boat afloat, all three of us, Fifi, Adam, and I. We wanted to live, if not then we’d die together. So no one would be left behind.”

  The boy, who has been sitting at the table fitting the pearls onto the pink heart that I found in the hotel shop, now slides off the chair and positions himself beside his mother. He offers her his hand and they stand side by side with their backs turned to me. He understands she is upset. He looks at his mother and then over his shoulder at me. And then again. I hear him say something with a questioning tone. He wants an answer. He wants to know what’s going on.

  “Did you know that blood turns black when it hardens?” she finally says, continuing to fix her gaze on the ocean.

  Should I tell her that she can take refuge under my wings while she’s waiting for the light to reappear?

  I walk over to her and say:

  “You’ve done really well.”

  She turns, but doesn’t let go of the boy’s hand, the sun is behind her and she stands in the middle of a radiant cloud of shimmering dust.

  “We try to do our best,” she says. “As people.”

  Flood calls unto flood

  The word has spread that I’m helping out the siblings and I’ve received several enquiries and requests from other people in the town, mainly women, wanting assistance with this or that. The queries have multiplied over the past few days and this morning there were five messages waiting in the lobby. Fifi says he took the liberty to write down orders and hands me some folded notes. Most of the jobs concern red water in the taps, clogged sinks, leaking seals, broken stoves, and other domestic appliances.

  I know where the residual-current device is, but there is a shortage of spare parts: tubes, wires, cans, washers.

  Can I fix a washing machine? Know anything about computers? A mirror also has to be put up on the other side of town.

  I do what I’m asked to do so long as it doesn’t send me down into the sewage system with a flashlight.

  “Hi, Mister Fix,” it says in the first folded letter. That’s what they call me.

  “People say you can fix anything,” the young man explains. “They also call you Mister Miracle.”

  “They’re wrong on that account,” I say to him. “Besides, they’re only temporary repairs,” I add.

  My insistence on the fact that I’m neither a plumber nor an electrician falls on deaf ears. They need an electrician. They need a carpenter. They need plumbers. They need builders.

  “There are so few people who know anything about electricity,” says Fifi.

  “Some people think it’s not fair that you’re only helping women,” I hear him add without looking at me. “I just wanted you to know that. And one other thing, there was a call from the restaurant. I’m supposed to tell you they’re serving blood pudding this evening.”

  RED

  I pluck up the courage to remind May of the need for paint, even though I suspect it’s difficult to come by.

  “The rooms need painting.”

  She puts down the vacuum cleaner.

  “Just not red.”

  Since the walls that don’t have any leafy wallpaper on them are light blue, her comment is bewildering.

  I suggest they stick to the same colour.

  “Don’t you want to keep the same colour?”

  “There was blood all over the country. Every footstep was bloody, there were pools of blood on the streets. Blood streamed down the roads, it was raining blood, and in the end all the rivers were red with blood,” she says in a detached voice, as if she were delivering a lecture, staring at the light blue wall as she speaks.

  “We poured red paint into the cracks the bombs left in the asphalt so that it would form blood roses. So there’s no red paint left in the country,” she concludes.

  I remain silent.

  “There might be some spackle,” she says, turning to me again, “but you need the right connections to get paint.”

  She stands dead still in the middle of the floor and takes a deep breath before continuing:

  “Human flesh is so delicate, the skin so quick to tear, steel bullets rip organs to shreds, concrete smashes bones, glass severs limbs,” she rattles off with a glazed expression.

  “There, there,” I say, as if I were talking to a child who’s afraid of the dark.

  “It’s such a short way to the heart,” she says.

  “There, there,” I say, taking her into my arms. The door is open to the corridor.

  It’s then that I notice that the boy is standing in the doorway and staring at us alternately. He had popped down to his uncle to hand him the tiles and to have a go at stirring the plaster and now he’s returned. I let go of her and turn away. Even though I’ve little sense of myself, I can feel the outlines of another living body.

  The boy rushes over to his mother.

  I’m about to say something else but instead ask:

  “Where is that house you’re going to move into, you women?” On several occasions she has mentioned a house that she and some of her female friends were going to renovate and live in together. Seven women, if I remember correctly, with three children. And Fifi.

  She looks at me. Eyeing me like a stranger. Which I am to myself and to others.

  “If you like, I could take a look at it for you,” I continue.

  She is silent for a long moment.

  “You’re lucky you haven’t killed anyone,” she finally says.

  HOUSE OF WOMEN

  The house stands on the other side of the town centre, and on our way May explains to me that the women who are going to live there together have been roaming from place to place and are staying in temporary accommodations at the moment. They have nothing, just a suitcase each or less.

  “One of them has papers that say she owns the house and she has invited the others to live with her. So there’ll be seven women and three children living there,” she confirms. “And then there’s Fifi,” she adds. “That’ll make two men, a twenty-year-old and a five-year-old, an uncle and a nephew who have both survived the war.”

  She tells me that some of the women are going to help run the hotel when the tourists return.

  The house is a three-storey building that stands on its own at the top of the street; the houses on either side of it were blown up. It has a big uncultivated lawn and creeping ivy that stretches to the top floor. May says that the cousin of one of the women was supposed to be helping out with the repairs, but he hasn’t been heard from in a long time.

  “I think it’s fairly likely that he’s left the country,” she concludes.

  The garden has high walls and I see how a play area could be made for the children. Even though most of the windows of the house are broken, at first glance, the foundation seems to be in a good state. The walls are in one piece and the flooring in surprisingly fine condition, but there’s no running water in the house, no electricity, and no heating. The water pipes and drainage are at the bottom of the neighbourhood and the main worry is that the house has been excluded from the new town planning.

  “We’re struggling to get it included,” says May.

  There is no furniture in the house, but judging by the mattress on the floor in one of the bedrooms, it’s obvious that someone has been staying here. I see t
hat it will be possible to fix up the house, but I’ll need more tools and materials. The pipes, sewage system, and electrical wiring also need mending. With some minor illegal adjustments we could temporarily connect to the electricity grid and start on some of the most pressing tasks. First the house needs to be sealed off from rodents and rain and the windowpanes have to be changed. I conduct an inspection and see that the mullions and window frames are intact.

  “I really want to help you—you women,” I say. “I can do some things but not everything.”

  May and I are on the second floor of the house and I’m finishing the measurements of a window when I sense something weighing on her.

  “There is one thing I wanted to mention to you before you meet the other women,” she says, leaning against a wall. “The thing is,” she says, “just like we don’t talk about who did what, we don’t ask about who went through what either.”

  “I understand.”

  I sense some agitation in her.

  “You don’t ask a man if he’s killed someone or a woman if she has been raped or by how many.”

  “No, you don’t have to worry about me asking any questions,” I say.

  “And when one sees a child, one doesn’t wonder whether it’s the child of a woman who was raped by an enemy soldier.”

  “No, one doesn’t.”

  She adjusts a lock of hair, tucks it under the clip.

  “All women are subjected to violence in war,” she continues without looking at me.

  I think of how young she is and how much she’s been through.

  “Soldiers don’t knock on your door to ask for your permission to shoot.”

  “No, they don’t.”

  She adjusts her hair again.

  “The only way to continue is to pretend we lead a normal life. To pretend everything is okay. To shut one’s eyes to the destruction.”

  I notice she has small pearl earrings that she touches from time to time, as if to reassure herself that they’re in place.

  I mention this to her and tell her they’re beautiful.

  “From my mother,” she says, and is about to add something but stops.

  She hesitates.

  “Despite the fear, I still clearly remember the stars at night. And the moon too, yes.”

  I mention the state where all lose themselves, the good and the bad

  When I get back to the hotel, I rip out the last page in the diary and make a list of what has to be done in the house and what I need.

  I’d caught a glimpse of my neighbour in the corridor and know he’s back. I knock on the door of number nine.

  When he opens, I hand him the list without accepting an invitation to step inside.

  He says it could well be that he knows contractors who are building in the area. The question is what would he get in return.

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? That’s not how it works. I do you a favour and you do me a favour in return.”

  “Not in this case. You’ll do things and get nothing in return. Except satisfaction,” I add.

  “You’ve got to follow the rules of the game.”

  “No, you’ve got to tell the contractors, your friends, that otherwise they’ll have the women against them.”

  This takes him by surprise.

  “Am I to tell the contractors, my friends, that otherwise they’ll have the women against them?”

  He repeats my words. I take that as a sign that he’s thinking. Then he says:

  “The house hasn’t been included in the reconstruction plan. It may be that some people don’t want you poking your nose into what they’re doing. Are you going to fix the whole country? Armed with your little drill and measuring tape? Do you think you can glue back together a broken world?”

  As he says this, I suddenly remember the floral dish with a gilded rim that I broke as a child and glued back together again. It took a lot of work to get the fragments to fit, but I succeeded. Which was why I was surprised when Mom threw it away some days later.

  “The world won’t be good just because you’ve got a roll of duct tape,” I hear him say.

  EXCHANGE OF MESSAGES

  Two days later there is a message waiting for me in reception. The young man hands me a folded handwritten note: Work on sewage system has commenced.

  In the next message, I send him the measurements of the windows and the glass I need.

  The answer comes the next day:

  Goods will be delivered on Monday.

  I can then start working on the windows.

  We write to each other for a whole week.

  Floor materials have arrived.

  The last message reads: Area has been swept for mines (garden safe).

  NOLI ME TANGERE (TOUCH ME NOT)

  Adam is with Fifi in the baths, helping him to sort through the body parts and search for three missing breasts, and I’m moving a wardrobe with May when she asks me:

  “Are you married?”

  “No, divorced.”

  “Do you have any other children apart from the daughter you mentioned the other day?”

  “No.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Twenty-six.”

  Before I know it, I’ve told her that Waterlily isn’t mine.

  “My daughter isn’t exactly mine,” I say.

  By way of explanation, I add:

  “I’m not her blood father.”

  I think about those words: blood father.

  “Have you been alone for long?”

  “Six months.”

  If she’d asked have I been lonely for long, I would have answered eight years and five months.

  That is precisely what she asks about next, loneliness.

  “Aren’t you lonely?”

  “Sometimes.”

  She edges closer to me, is almost standing right against me.

  “Don’t you long to feel the warmth of another body?”

  I’m silent and then say:

  “It’s been such a long time.”

  “How long?”

  “Pretty long.”

  “More than two years?”

  Should I trust her with this?

  I take a deep breath before saying it:

  “Eight years and five months.” I could have added eleven days.

  She slides against me and I feel her closeness grow like a full moon.

  Should I tell her how things are, that I don’t know how to do it anymore?

  That I’m scared?

  I hesitate.

  “You’re my daughter’s age.”

  “I’m older than her,” she says. “I’m older than you. I’m two hundred years old and I’ve seen it all. Besides, I thought she wasn’t yours, your daughter.”

  “No, but she’s still my daughter.” I could have added, “She’s the only Gudrún Waterlily Jónasdóttir in the whole world.”

  “But I’m not her.”

  My heart pounds.

  “No, you’re not her.”

  I try to think fast.

  “What about younger men, of your age?”

  “They don’t exist. I wake up and look at the man lying on the pillow beside me and think he’s killed somebody. Still, that wasn’t why I asked,” she adds softly.

  What can I say?

  That I’m not the man for her. That she’ll know him when he comes because he will have forged a ploughshare from a sword. And then I would start working on the tiling as if nothing had happened.

  “I need more time,” I say.

  “How much time?”

  It’s not that the question isn’t an important one, just that I don’t know the answer.

  A man is half man, half animal

  There is a stew with some kind of meat and noodles at Restaurant Limbo. I detect a taste of paprika and cumin and pull the bay leaf out of the mash and place it on the rim of the bowl. The owner immediately drags over a chair to chat and says that he’s heard I’ve been helping women in the town with vario
us odd jobs. He lists off sinks, TVs, antennas, washing machines.

  “It’s the talk of the town,” he says. “We’ve also heard that you’ve thrown yourself into fixing up a house.”

  He is quiet for a moment and assumes a grave air:

  “These things get around.”

  “Yes, they asked me for help,” I say.

  I could have added, a woman asks me to do something and I do it.

  I’m used to that from home.

  “It can cause problems.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, it doesn’t look good. That you only help women. It doesn’t go down too well. Some people are offended by it.”

  He has the expression of a man who is about to burst into tears.

  He pauses in his speech, to give himself time to recover.

  “Yes, there are also men in this world who need help. There has to be an equal share,” he says. And then adds, “Even though some people don’t realise it.”

  He stands up to take the bowl and says that he had actually intended to offer me some almond cake. He stresses the words “had actually intended to” as if he’d given up on the idea. Because there is no longer any reason for it.

  “While I’ve been cooking for you, almost every day, you still refuse to make those swinging doors.”

  I’d forgotten them.

  “I’ve discussed them with you several times.”

  He stands with the bowl in his hands and doesn’t seem to be on his way to the kitchen anymore.

  “I got you shirts and you say you can’t manage one set of swinging doors.”

  I reflect on this.

  “Didn’t we need some materials?”

  “I’ve got them.”

  “Including the hinges?”

  “Yes, including the hinges.”

  “And tools?”

  “I’m working on them.”

  I tell him I also want to be remunerated:

  “I want to be paid.”

  He throws up his arms.

  “You’ll be paid in meals. Free meals. Once a day.”

  I think about how much he needs me and what demands I can make. Barter is the only currency around here. I tell him I’ll make the swinging doors if I get to keep the tools: