Hotel Iris

by Yoko Ogawa

  I opened the note case on the pendant the nephew had left with me. It seemed larger here in my hand than it had dangling around his neck. The silver plating was marred in places, but with a little click it had quite easily opened, and inside I found a small pad of notepapers, enough to hold all his thoughts.

  “Are you alone?” someone said. I looked up to find two boys standing in front of me. They were so much alike they could have been twins. “Would you like to go swimming?” one said. I shook my head. “We’ll take you out on our boat. It’s in the harbor around the cape.”

  “And if you don’t like boats, we could go dancing tonight. Where are you staying? We’re at the Dolphin, the hotel across from the pier. Do you know it?”

  The translator had finally reached the buoy, and he and his nephew were clutching the line that secured it, bobbing in the waves.

  “Don’t be so stuck-up,” one of the boys said as he tried to put his hand on my shoulder. I quickly tore a note from the pad, scribbled on it, and handed it to him.

  “I can’t speak.”

  They looked at one another and shrugged, then left without another word. The pen had felt good in my hand, and the blue ink flowed smoothly on the paper.

  A huge wave broke on the beach, scattering the bathers for a moment. It washed up new shells and driftwood and bits of fishing net. A crab made its way painstakingly across a beach towel. The tide was covering the seawall again.

  I suddenly realized that they were waving at me from the surf. I raised my hand to wave back, but then decided not to. Perhaps the sun had been playing tricks on my eyes and no one had waved at all.

  ———

  “You should have come in,” said the translator, drying himself with a towel. “It was wonderful.”

  “I will next time,” I said.

  “It’s colder than I thought it would be. I wonder how far we swam—half a kilometer? It’s been a long time since I’ve been in the water. I usually don’t swim unless he’s visiting.”

  He was still in high spirits, but he looked even older than usual when wet. His hair was plastered on his scalp like strands of seaweed, and his bathing suit drooped pathetically. Perhaps he knew how he looked, because he took great care in drying himself.

  His nephew retrieved the pendant from me and hung it carefully back around his neck, as if it were very precious. I didn’t tell him that I had used a sheet of paper. He was still panting. His breath was cool and smelled of the sea.

  The sun had shifted, lengthening the shadow of the umbrella. The nephew brushed his hair from his eyes and lay down, oblivious to the sand on his back. We bought three bottles of soda from the drinks vendor. As the nephew drank, the liquid gurgled down his throat, and for a moment I thought I heard nonsense words in the sound of him swallowing.

  “I wonder what people think of us,” I said.

  “I suppose they think we’re brother and sister, out for a day at the beach with our butler.” Even lying on his side, he could write quite quickly.

  The translator glanced at the note and said, “What a delightful idea. You lost your parents at a young age. You attend separate boarding schools and are only together for vacations. During the summer, you come to your house by the sea. And I am your guardian. A faithful servant who obeys even your most unreasonable orders, who gladly subjects himself to the worst indignities on your behalf, who has sworn his unconditional loyalty to you.” He nodded to himself in satisfaction at this scenario and then finished his soda.

  “I doubt anyone could guess the truth,” I said.

  I could see the twins who had approached me earlier talking to another girl. More umbrellas had sprung up, and the sea was full of bobbing heads, some all the way down at the base of the cape.

  “It’s much more fun if they don’t.” The translator buried his empty bottle in the sand.

  “What shall we do for lunch?” The nephew handed this note to his uncle.

  “Are you hungry already?” the translator asked. His nephew nodded his head. “Don’t worry, I’ve got everything prepared at the house. Pureed sea bass and broccoli soup. Your favorites.” He put his nephew’s sandals next to the blanket, brushed the sand from his shoulders, and straightened the chain on the pendant. Just as a real servant might. “Mari, you’ll come, too, won’t you?” he said, turning to me with a gentle smile, as if to say he hadn’t forgotten me.

  “I’m afraid I can’t. Mother is expecting me back by noon.” I handed him my half-empty soda bottle and went in for a swim. Floating on my back, I let my hair spread out on the surface of the water.

  I wanted to be Marie. I wanted him to grab my hair and pull me down to the bottom of the sea, to force me to swallow his bitter potion.

  E L E V E N

  Mother was furious that I had spoiled my hair. “Haven’t I told you not to go swimming? Now go get the hair dryer and the brush and the camellia oil, and hurry up! We have too much to do today for you to be dawdling about.” In the twinkling of an eye, she had repaired my hair.

  Later, when I went out that evening to bring in the wash, my bathing suit was gone. There was no sign of it anywhere. The maid was stealing from me again.

  The maid had worked all day, even staying late. She had waxed the floor in the lobby, cut the grass in the courtyard, and washed the windows in the dining room—all while she asked me disturbing questions.

  “What would you do if your mother told you she was getting married again?”

  “If she leaves you the hotel, would you keep me on?”

  “Did you know I was your father’s first lover?”

  “Are you still seeing that boy?”

  I answered halfheartedly or pretended not to hear, but she kept after me just the same. She was probably secretly gloating at having made off with my bathing suit. When Mother handed her a can of beer as she was getting ready to leave, she slipped it into her bag—the bag where she must have hidden my suit.

  The next day something odd happened at the beach. Thousands of dead fish washed up on the tide. The news spread through town at dawn, and by midmorning we heard from the man who delivered our milk.

  “Everyone’s talking about it. They’re scattered from the plaza all the way up the beach. You can barely see the sand. Disgusting! And everyone’s down there checking it out—the mayor, the cops, the chamber of commerce. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I suppose they’ll have to close the beach for a while. It kind of gives you the creeps, like an evil omen.”

  When the maid and I went down to see what was happening, we were met by a terrible stench at the shore road. Just as the milkman had said, everything had changed in the course of one night, as though the sea had brought a completely different beach to the shore.

  The bathhouse, the ice cream stand, and the lifeguard station were all surrounded by a blanket of dead fish. The sea was gray and flat. The shining sun reflected off their scales. Big ones, little ones, fat ones, thin ones, striped ones, mouths open, gills flayed. Some belly-up, some half buried in the sand, all piled one on top of the other, and all quite dead, with not so much as a twitch anywhere. There were certainly no open umbrellas on the beach today.

  “Look, Mari,” gasped the maid. “How do you think they got like that?” A crowd had gathered on the breakwater, and the TV station had sent a camera crew. People were taking pictures and discussing the strange sight; some had even gone down on the sand to examine the fish more closely. “This is terrible! All the tourists will leave town. What are we going to do? Your mother will be beside herself.” But the maid seemed almost pleased. She grabbed my arm and pressed against me.

  The spot where I had drunk my soda with the translator and his nephew the day before was buried under a drift of dead fish, and each wave brought more and more to the beach. Though the fish were dead, the mass of them seemed like some new living creature that had come from the bottom of the sea to attack us.

  The tourists and locals could not stop discussing it, offering explanations: “Maybe s
omebody dumped them here out of spite.” “No, it has to be some weird natural phenomenon.” “It’s been so hot, maybe even the fish couldn’t stand it.” “No, it’s a curse, from a sailor who died at sea.”

  When the breeze blew in toward the shore, the smell was unbearable. Hands flew up to cover noses, and the maid buried her face in my shoulder. The stench was so foul it almost seemed my own brain was rotting; still, no one made a move to leave.

  Over the next two days, a constant stream of trucks hauled the fish out of town. Experts appeared on television to explain that the unusual heat had raised the water temperature, causing a red tide. The fish had died from lack of oxygen. Some people insisted that the problem was toxic runoff from the paper plant. Everyone seemed uneasy, and the delivery people who came to the Iris reported the various theories that circulated through town. At any rate, no one wanted to eat fish for the time being.

  Even after the trucks had taken away the last of it, there were still dead fish here and there around town. A car would run over one, squashing it flat. Then the liquefied organs would spill out and plaster it to the road. Careless souls who happened to step on these would leap back as if they had stumbled onto some omen of ill fortune.

  “You’re very good,” I said, but he was apparently embarrassed and didn’t look up.

  “Not really. My uncle exaggerates.” He had transferred his paintbrush to his left hand, freeing the right for the pendant. His wooden paint box was well used. It held a jumble of palettes, brushes, and tubes of paint, some of them new, and others squashed flat and nearly empty.

  I was looking down at the beach from the bus stop when I’d spotted him. He was sitting on a rock at the edge of the water, painting a picture. I recognized him from the way he pushed back his hair, and from his pendant.

  Descending the stairs on the breakwater, I came up behind the rock and called out to him. He seemed only mildly surprised to see me and simply nodded in my direction.

  “I was waiting for guests at the bus stop, but they didn’t come,” I explained. He continued to work at his sketchbook. The picture, which seemed to be nearly finished, showed the sea and the ramparts, and the town beyond. He had also painted the island in the distance. “They phoned from the station to say they would be on the three thirty bus, but they must have missed it. I have nearly an hour until the next one.” He did not answer me, but I didn’t mind. I knew he understood me, and I was used to his silence. “How is your uncle?”

  “He’s busy with a rush job, translating an import permit for caviar.” As he handed me the note, I realized that he had to stop painting in order to answer me, so I decided to sit quietly and watch for a while. I found a flat spot on the rock next to him in order to be out of the way. My feet were nearly dangling in the water.

  The fish had been cleared away and the sea had returned to normal, but there were very few swimmers. The health department had tested the water and announced that it was safe, but their assurances had little effect. Most people were still upset by the fish and had no desire to swim. We’d had our share of cancellations at the Iris as well, and, just as the maid had predicted, Mother was in a foul mood. The heat had not broken, but with the departure of the tourists, the mood in town seemed more like autumn.

  In his painting, the sea was a pale blue, dotted here and there with the white crests of waves. As his brush dabbed at the paper, the waves became more and more transparent. Though he seemed to pay little attention to fine details, he had captured the effect of the damp shells clinging to the seawall and the ear-shaped island protruding from the sea.

  He squeezed dabs of color onto the palette, wet his brush in a cup of water, and mixed the paints until he had just the right shade. His eyes darted from his sketchbook to the palette to the scene before him. He also glanced over at me from time to time, but he never put down his brush to write me a note. From the uneven rock where we sat perched, everything—the paint box, the cup, and even the two of us—was at an angle.

  “The spray will get you there. You should sit over here.” He stopped painting at last and handed me this note. Then he moved his knapsack to make room next to him.

  “Thanks,” I said, sitting down where he had indicated.

  “You don’t have to go back to the hotel?”

  “Mother will be angry if I don’t wait for the guests. Do you mind if I stay here? I’ll try not to bother you.” He nodded and turned back to the sketchbook.

  I began to wonder what the translator was doing. Was he flipping through a dictionary, looking up words with his magnifying glass? Writing down words about caviar in his careful characters? Had he put aside Marie’s novel for the moment?

  “What happened on the island the day the fish died?” I asked.

  “Nothing out of the ordinary. Except that the coastline turned dark.”

  Depending on the direction of the wind, the fish smell still returned from time to time, as though the sand itself had taken on the stench of death.

  A couple was sunbathing in deck chairs on the beach. A boy was windsurfing just offshore. A few children were gathering shells in the surf. Otherwise, the beach was empty. The drinks vendors and the lifeguards were gone. Hermit crabs cowered in the tidal pools on the rock where we were sitting, along with larger, bright red crabs and some sort of repulsive bug. The waves crashed again and again over the heavy silence of the beach.

  “Why does your uncle live alone on the island?” When at last he put his brush in the cup of water, I asked the question that had been on my mind. “He has no telephone, no TV. No family or friends, no one comes to see him. … Except you.”

  “He has you.” The sunlight on the white paper made the note hard to read. “He’s not the kind of man to have lots of friends. You’re enough for him.”

  “Has he told you about us?”

  “No, but I can tell by looking at the two of you.” He used a charcoal pencil to add shadows to the ramparts. As the paint dried, the color of the sea had deepened. A crab tried to climb onto the paint box but lost its footing and fell into the water.

  I wondered whether he really knew what went on between us. How could he know? My memories of what the translator had done seemed like nothing but beautiful illusions, even to me.

  “He loves you,” I said, but I immediately regretted speaking so openly. “I can feel it when I watch the two of you together. The way he looks at you with just a hint of worry in his eyes, the way he touches you whenever he can.”

  “He thinks of me as his son.”

  “No, it’s not like that. Until you came, I would not have believed that he could give himself so completely to another person, the way he does with you.”

  I wanted to tell him that I ought to be the only one the translator wanted, that it was wrong of him to come between us. But I couldn’t bring myself to say it.

  “I remind him of his wife, who died too young.” The characters flowed from his pen like a long, thin design, and though he had painted and written a great deal, he never seemed to tire. “He dotes on me as a kind of penance.”

  “Penance for what?”

  “Not for anything he did. There’s really no one to blame. In the end, it was just a terrible accident.”

  “But how did she die?”

  “She caught her scarf in a train door.” I read the note three times, unable to grasp the meaning of the words. “My uncle had been invited by a Russian university and he was leaving for Moscow. The train hadn’t arrived yet. I was just a baby, and my aunt was holding me on the platform. My uncle was about to take our picture when the train we were standing beside began to move. No one realized that her scarf was caught in the door.”

  “But what happened?” The tip of his pen ran across the paper, the sound lost in the waves. He coughed, bit a fingernail, tapped the toe of his tennis shoe on the rock. I could hear the noises he made more clearly than I could have heard any words. Eventually, his hand reached out to deliver the next note, and for that one moment, the tips of our fing
ers met. His were covered with paint.

  “They finally realized what was happening when the train began dragging her along the platform, but there was nothing they could do. My mother screamed. My aunt was being strangled and pulled away more and more quickly—and I was still in her arms. In the end, her head hit the last pillar on the platform and she died instantly. Her skull was crushed, her neck was broken, and the scarf had burned away all the skin on her neck. But she still had me tight in her arms, and there wasn’t a scratch on me.”

  He had written all of this hunched over his notepad, scribbling intently, without once stopping or hesitating, as if he had the whole story memorized from constant repetition. Even words like “crushed” and “burned” didn’t seem so terrible in his graceful blue characters.

  “Of course, I don’t remember any of this,” he added. “My mother told me everything.”

  “And there was nothing your uncle could have done?”

  “Nothing. He just called after her to drop the baby so she could untie the scarf. I don’t know what would have happened to me if she had listened to him. But it’s pointless to wonder about that. At any rate, there were bad feelings between my mother and my uncle after that—I suppose because he’d been willing to sacrifice me to save his wife.”

  The scene came to me in these tiny scraps of paper—the dim light of the platform, the large, pale face of the clock, flashbulbs, high-heeled shoes clattering across the concrete, unbearable pain, the cold metal of the pillar.

  “I have no way of knowing whether my mother’s memories are accurate. I suppose no one’s to blame. But one thing’s certain: we were all badly damaged by that little breeze that tugged at the end of her scarf. …”

  “I’ve seen the scarf,” I said. “He keeps it hidden in a drawer.”