I quickly glance in the mirror and run my hand through my hair before closing the door behind me.
Her room is number eleven, at the very bottom of the corridor.
She stands opposite me and pulls the bedspread off the bed, but doesn’t fold it. Pigeons are cooing outside the window.
I unbutton the top button of my red shirt, peel back to the flesh. Under the shirt is a white water lily and under the water lily a heart still beats. Then I undo the next two buttons, while she handles her buttons and zippers. Once I’ve taken off my shirt and trousers, I remove my socks, it doesn’t take long. I take off my underpants and stand in front of her on the floor, stark naked. In the centre of the forest painting over the bed, between the black tree trunks, stands a hunter with a bow and arrow, who is looking a leopard in the eye. It is then that I notice that between the trees there is a winding path that seems to lead out of the painting. I stretch out my hand, grope towards her and take one step forward, there are still three floorboards between us. Then I take another step, a moment later skin touches skin. We press our palms against each other, lifeline against lifeline, artery against artery, I feel the pulsations through my entire body, my neck, knees, and arms, I feel the blood pumping between my organs. Then I touch her collarbone.
“Is that a flower?” she asks, placing her palm flat on my chest.
I take a breath. And then exhale.
STEEL LEGS LTD.
I phone Waterlily and get straight to the point, while Fifi fiddles with the computer.
“Doesn’t …” I try to remember my daughter’s ex-boyfriend’s name. “Is Frosti still working in that prosthetics firm?”
I explain to her on the phone that I’m in touch with a physiotherapist who works on the rehabilitation of land mine victims. The physiotherapist is one of the women in the house who May introduced me to.
“Most of the people who lose a limb do so after a war,” I say.
“I see.”
“The woman I’m in touch with says she gets limbless people in a very bad state, but that they leave her walking on artificial legs.”
I continue:
“I need prosthetic legs for fourteen people.”
“Yeah?”
“For a seven-year-old boy, an eleven-year-old girl, a fourteen-year-old teenager, a twenty-one-year-old woman, and for a thirty-three-year-old and a forty-four-year-old man.” I rattle off part of the list and tell her I’ll be taking the measurements and sending them to her.
I hesitate:
“And I need to get a loan from you for this.”
There is a silence at the other end of the line, then she says:
“Dad, aren’t you coming home soon?”
“Not straightaway. You’re visiting your granny, aren’t you?” She lowers her voice and I get the feeling she’s moving.
“I’m actually at granny’s right now.”
“Hang on,” she says and I hear her raising her voice to explain something to her granny.
In the meantime, I wait and worry about the phone bill.
“Granny wants to have a word with you, Dad.”
I hear her handing Mom the phone.
“Hello, this is Gudrún Stella Jónasdóttir Snæland.”
“Yes, it’s me, Mom.”
“Waterlily tells me you’ve gone travelling. Are you abroad? Are you settling your affairs?”
“I suppose I am.”
“What’s the weather like? Isn’t it always the same weather abroad?”
“It’s raining.”
“Is there a war?”
“No, the war is over.”
“The guilty ones get away. It’s always the innocent ones who suffer.”
“Yes, I know, Mom.”
“Your father and I went to the War Museum on our honeymoon, that’s how romantic he was.”
“Yes, you mentioned that.”
Then she wants to remind me of the branch that beats against the window.
“You were going to saw it off for me. Don’t you have your father’s saw?”
I suddenly have an image of my mother dancing on the linoleum in the kitchen. She is wearing a dappled blouse and has slipped a record on the turntable and I stand there watching her. My arm is wrapped in a sling, home alone with Mom and not going to school for a few days. What record was she listening to? Little Richard? She wants to show me how to twist and grabs my unbroken arm. I’m in my socks.
Waterlily comes back on the phone.
“Do you think it’s possible to love someone you’ve only seen?” she asks me.
“Why do you ask?”
“No, because I saw a man at the bank yesterday.”
And then there’s something else weighing on her heart.
“It occurred to me that we could go on a mountain walk when you come home. I bought hiking boots. I long to sleep in a tent for as many nights as possible this summer.”
Then silence erupts, like a mountain
I notice Fifi occasionally glancing at me as I’m talking on the phone. When I’ve hung up, it’s as if he’s about to ask me something but then thinks better of it.
Instead he says:
“They came and took away the other guest last night.”
“Who came? Took who?”
“The police. The man in room nine. He was led away in handcuffs.”
“What happened?”
He tells me that Adam had slipped into the man’s bedroom while May was cleaning and had hidden himself in a wardrobe. When he was found, they also found artefacts that had been bought on the black market—in addition to the three breasts that were missing from the mosaic—so they notified the police.
“He’ll be charged with theft and the illegal sale of antiquities.”
He then switches topics:
“We decided to follow your advice and keep the name Hotel Silence. And we put up a sign. In three languages.” He points at a sign behind him.
“Silence saves the world,” it says.
I count the steps between you and me
May opens the door, she is wearing a green buttoned cardigan.
“For you,” I say, handing her the record player. “You just have to plug it in.”
“You didn’t need more time” is the first thing she says to me. “You just didn’t want me.”
I ask her if I can come in and she nods.
The boy is asleep in bed, with a gaping mouth and open palms. Beside him lies an alphabet book with pictures. She tells me that the school will be reopening in the autumn and that he has started to practice reading.
Once I’ve plugged in the turntable, I fetch the collection of records.
I pull Ziggy Stardust out of its sleeve and slip it on.
“I was wondering if you could teach me how to dance.”
What was it that Mom said again? That when the racket of machine guns has stopped people feel a need to dance and go to the movies.
She looks at me with a grave expression for a moment, then bursts into a laugh.
I feel I need to explain myself.
“My wife—ex-wife—said I didn’t know how to dance.”
“What kind of dancing? You mean a two-step?”
“Just how a man dances with a woman.”
It’s a difficult thing for me to say.
“When do you want to start?”
“Right now? That’s if you’re not busy. If it doesn’t wake Adam up.”
She says:
“He was used to sleeping through air raids.”
And then:
“You place one hand here and I hold you here, you step forward and I step back, then I step forward and you back.”
We’re standing in the middle of the tiled floor, bang in the centre, then we move towards the window.
“Picture this as a journey,” she continues.
“Like this?”
“Yes, like that. It’s like walking.”
“We’re alike, you and I,” I say.
“I know
,” she says without looking at me.
She hesitates. Then:
“This morning I could smell grass again for the first time.”
The light from the stars needs time
“There are some sunrises that stand out,” Svanur had said. The sun rises. Slices the sky in two. Without shedding any blood. First there is a horizontal line of light along the floor, a single streak, then more and more streaks until a puddle of light forms on the floor.
I’m shaving when I’m called to the phone. Fifi is in his tracksuit trousers and looks like he’s been woken up.
“She says she’s your daughter,” he says.
I immediately know something is wrong from the tone of her voice.
“It’s Svanur, Dad. He walked into the sea. His dog was found on the beach, totally drenched. She’d swum after him but turned back.”
“Does anyone ever recover from being born?” Svanur had asked. “If people were given a say,” he added, “might they decide not to be born?”
She says she’d dropped by the apartment two days ago to water the plant and met Svanur outside.
“He was vacuuming the caravan and thought he’d heard some suspicious sound coming from my car as I was driving onto the street. He thought it might be the wheel alignment on the right-hand side and offered to check it out. Then he embraced me and said that woman is the future of mankind. I’ve been trying to find out if that’s a quotation from somewhere.”
JUNE 17
“Hey,” says the cabdriver, when he throws the suitcase into the trunk and invites me to sit in the front. “I’ve driven you before. Not long after Mick Jagger. I said it to myself the second I saw you: It’s him. The man with the toolbox.”
Notes
In a number of places in the book there are quotations from Jónas Thorbjarnarson’s collection of poems Hvar endar maður?. In most cases—not all—these are chapter titles, occurring on pages 65, 67, 92, 94, 96, and 115.
There are loose translations from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra on pages 10, 11, 44, 68, and 169, as well as from Beyond Good and Evil on pages 22, 118, and 212.
Poems by Steinn Steinarr are quoted on pages 79 and 115. The quotation on page 99 is from the sculptor Jón Gunnar Árnason.
The heading on page 128 is an indirect reference to St. Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians in the Bible, and page 132 quotes from the prophet Isaiah.
Hotel Silence Page 15
