Hotel Silence E-Book

Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

A funny, wistful and utterly beguiling novel about a man whose life is falling apart, and how he learns to put it back together JÓNAS FEELS LIKE HIS LIFE IS OVER. His wife has left him, his mother is slipping deeper into dementia, and his daughter is no longer who he thought. So he comes up with a foolproof plan: to buy a one-way ticket to a chaotic, war-ravaged country and put an end to it all. But on arriving at Hotel Silence, he finds his plans - and his anonymity - begin to dissolve under the foreign sun. Now there are other things that need his attention, like the crumbling hotel itself, the staff who run it, and his unusual fellow guests. And soon it becomes clear that Jónas must decide whether he really wants to leave it all behind; or give life a second chance, albeit down a must unexpected path... Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir is an Icelandic prize-winning novelist, playwright and a poet. She is the author of five novels, a collection of poetry and four plays that have been performed at the National Theatre in Iceland and at the Reykjavik City Theatre. She also writes the lyrics for the Icelandic performance pop band Milkywhale. Auður Ava's novels have been translated into over 25 languages and among them are The Greenhouse and Butterflies in November. Her new novel, Hotel Silence, won the Icelandic Literary Prize 2016 and was chosen Best Icelandic Novel in 2016 by booksellers in Iceland. Auður Ava lives in Reykjavik.

Leseprobe

PUSHKIN PRESS

PRAISE FOR AUÐUR AVA ÓLAFSDÓTTIR’S

Butterflies in November

‘Charmingly done… funny and wistful, but there’s a darker narrative just beneath the surface… What begins as a tragicomic, quirky tale develops into a very moving, layered and optimistic piece of writing’

FT

‘With subtle prose and sardonic humor Ólafsdóttir upends expectations’

New York Times

‘Evocative, humorous… The beguiling imagery captures the fragile and fleeting beauty of those loved and lost, as well as the possibilities of self reinvention; of shedding skins, growing wings’

Observer

‘Sadness and humour coexist beautifully in Butterflies in November’

Metro

‘The author… takes mundane subjects in life… and makes them quirky, fun, adorable and bizarre. You'll savour each page of this book’

Company

‘Gorgeously quirky’

Stylist

‘[Butterflies in November] has many bleak moments, but plenty of funny ones too… we warm to Ólafsdóttir’s clear-eyed, quirky heroine’

Daily Mail

Dedicated to all the unknown victims: nurses, teachers, bartenders, poets, schoolchildren, librarians, and electricians.

And also to J.

The formation of a scar is a natural part of the biological process, which occurs when a lesion to the skin or other body tissue grows after an accident, illness, or surgery. Since the body is unable to create an exact replica of the damaged tissue, the fresh tissue grows with a new texture and properties that differ from the undamaged skin around it.

The navel is our centre or core and by that we mean the centre of the universe. It is a scar that no longer serves a purpose.

—Bland.is

CONTENTS

Title PageDedicationEpigraphHotel SilenceI. FLESHII. SCARSNotesAbout the PublisherCopyright

HOTEL SILENCE

31 MAY

I know how ludicrous I look naked, nevertheless I start to undress, first my trousers and socks, then I unbutton my shirt, revealing the glistening white water lily on my pink flesh, half a knife’s length away from the muscular organ that pumps eight thousand litres of blood a day, finally I take off my underpants—all in that order. It doesn’t take long. Then I stand stark naked on the parquet floor in front of the woman, I am as God made me, plus forty-nine years and four days, not that my thoughts are on God at this moment. We are still separated by three floorboards, massive pinewood from the surrounding forest, which is carpeted with mines, each floorboard is thirty centimetres wide, with intermittent gaps, and I stretch out my arms, groping towards her like a blind man trying to catch his bearings. First I reach the surface of the body, the skin, a streak of moonlight caressing her back through a slit between the curtains. She takes one step towards me, I step on a creaking floorboard. And she also holds out her hand, measuring palm against palm, lifeline against lifeline, and I feel a turbulence gushing through my carotid artery and also a pulsation in my knees and arms, how the blood flows from organ to organ. Leaf-patterned wallpaper adorns the walls around the bed in room eleven of Hotel Silence and I think to myself, tomorrow I’ll start to sandpaper and polish the floor.

I

FLESH

The skin is the largest organ of the human body. The skin of a fully grown adult has a surface area of two square metres and weighs five kilos. In many other animals the skin is referred to as the hide or pelt. In old Icelandic the word skin also means flesh.

5 MAY

The table in Tryggvi’s Tattoo Parlour is covered with small glass jars of multicoloured inks and the young man asks me if I’ve chosen a picture yet or whether I’m thinking of a personal pattern or symbol?

He himself is covered in tattoos all over his body. I observe a snake winding up his neck and wrapping itself around a black skull. Ink flows through his limbs and the triceps of the arm that holds the needle sports a coil of triple barbed wire.

“Many people come here to camouflage their scars,” says the tattooist, talking to me in the mirror. When he turns around, as far as I can make out, the hooves of a prancing horse emerge from the back of his vest.

He bends over a stack of plastic folders, chooses one, and runs his eyes over it to find a picture to show me.

“Wings are a big favourite among middle-aged men,” I hear him say, and then notice that there are four swords piercing a flaming heart on his other upper arm.

I have a total of seven scars on my body, four above my belly button, the point of origin, and three below it. A bird wing that would cover the shoulder, say from the neck down to the collarbone, would conceal two, even three of them. Like a familiar and comforting old acquaintance, its wing could become the feathered shadow of myself, my shield and fortress. The oily plumage would mantle the exposed vulnerable pink flesh.

The kid flips swiftly through drawings to show me various versions of bird wings, finally pointing his index finger at one image:

“Eagle wings are the most popular.”

He could have added, what man doesn’t dream of being a bird of prey, drifting solitarily across the globe, soaring over mountain lagoons, gullies, and marshes, hunting for a prey to snatch?

But instead he says:

“Just take your time.”

And he explains to me that he has another customer in a chair on the other side of the curtain and that he is just about to finish the national flag, complete with flapping and shading.

He lowers his voice.

“I told him the flagpole would bend if he put on two kilos but he insisted on having it.”

I was planning on dropping in on Mom before her nap and wanted to wind this transaction up as quickly as possible.

“I was thinking of a drill.”

If my request has taken him by surprise, he shows no sign of it and immediately starts searching through the appropriate folder.

“We might have a drill in here somewhere under domestic appliances,” he says. “Anyway, it’s no more complicated than the quad bike I did last week.”

“No, I was joking,” I say.

He looks at me with a grave air and it’s difficult to decipher whether he’s offended or not.

I hurriedly dig into my pocket and pull out a folded sheet of paper, open the drawing, and hand it to him. He takes it and irons out all the corners before finally holding it up to the light. I’ve managed to surprise him. He is unable to conceal his incertitude.

“Is this a flower or …”

“A water lily,” I say without hesitation.

“And just one colour?”

“Yes, just one colour, white. No shadowing,” I add.

“And no inscription?”

“No, no inscription.”

He puts the folders back, says he can do the flower freehand, and turns on the tattoo drill.

“And where do you want it?”

He prepares to dip the needle into a white liquid.

I unbutton my shirt and point at my heart.

“We’ll have to shave the hair first,” he says, turning off the drill. “Otherwise your flower will be lost in the darkness of a forest.”

I mention the state where the slow suicide of all men goes under the name of “life”

The shortest route to the old folk’s home is through the graveyard.

I’ve always imagined that the fifth month would be the last month of my life and that there would be more than one five in that final date, if not the fifth of the fifth, then the fifteenth of the fifth or the twenty-fifth of the fifth. That would also be the month of my birthday. The ducks would have completed their mating by then, but there wouldn’t just be ducks on the lake but also oystercatchers and purple sandpipers, because there would be birdsong on the nightless spring day I cease to exist.

Will the world miss me? No. Will the world be any poorer without me? No. Will the world survive without me? Yes. Is the world a better place now than when I came into it? No. What have I done to improve it? Nothing.

On my way down Skothúsvegur I reflect on how one should go about borrowing a hunting rifle from a neighbour. Does one borrow a weapon the same way one borrows a hose extension? What animals are hunted at the beginning of May? One can’t shoot the messenger of spring, the golden plover, who has just returned to the island, or a duck hatching from an egg. Could I say that I want to shoot a great black-backed gull that keeps me awake in the attic apartment of a residential block in the city centre? Wouldn’t Svanur find it suspicious if I were to suddenly turn into a spokesman for ducklings’ rights? Besides, Svanur knows that I’m no hunter. Although I’ve experienced standing in the middle of a freezing cold river in my crotch-high boots, alone up on a heath, and felt the cold pressing against my body like a thick wall and pebbles on the spongy bed under my waders, and then felt how the river swiftly tugged at me below, how the bottom deepened and vanished, while I stared into the gaping, sucking vortex, I have never fired a gun. On my last fishing trip I came home with two trout, which I filleted and fried with chives I trimmed off a pot on the balcony. Svanur also knows that I can’t bear violence after he tried to drag me to see Die Hard 4. What does one shoot in May apart from one’s self? Or a fellow Homo sapiens? He would put two and two together.

Svanur isn’t the kind of man who asks questions, though. Or who generally contemplates one’s inner life. He isn’t the kind of guy who would mention a full moon or comment on the northern lights. He’d never speak of the rainbow colours at the outermost ends of human knowledge. He wouldn’t even point out the colours in the sky to his wife, Aurora, the rose-pink hue of daybreak, he wouldn’t say, “There she is, your namesake.” No more than Aurora would mention the sky to her husband. There’s a clear division of tasks in their household and she alone drags the teenager out of bed in the morning. He, on the other hand, takes care of walking their fourteen-year-old border collie bitch who hobbles lamely in the front. No, Svanur wouldn’t mix any feelings into the issue, he’d just hand me the rifle and say, that’s a Remington 40-XB, bedded but with the original lock and barrel, even if he suspected I was going to shoot myself.

The navel is a scar on people’s abdomen, which formed when the remains of the umbilical cord dropped off. When a child is born, the umbilical cord is clamped and then cut to sever the link between mother and child. The first scar is therefore connected to the mother

The old folks sit stooped on park benches under woollen blankets in the cold spring sun, with a flock of geese nearby, paired off in twos. I notice a bird huddled on its own apart from the group, and it doesn’t move, even when I walk up to it. One of its wings is bent backwards, clearly broken. The wounded goose is partnerless and won’t procreate. God is sending me a message. Not that I believe in him.

My mother slouches in a recliner, her feet don’t touch the ground, her slippers are too big, above them are her twiggy legs, she’s shrivelled to almost nothing, she has ceased to be flesh, as light as a feather, held together by her Styrofoam bones and a few tendons. What comes to mind is the weathered skeleton of a bird that has been left on the heath all winter; the vacant carcass remains, but ultimately disintegrates, turning into a ball of dust with claws. It is hard to imagine that this scrawny little woman, who doesn’t reach my shoulders, once inhabited a female form. I recognise her special-occasion skirt, which has grown far too baggy around the waist, far too big on her, clothes that belong to a former life, another time zone.

I’m not going to end up like Mom.

A smell hangs in the air, I walk through clouds of vapour emanating from bulging meatballs and cabbage. On the food cart in the corridor there are plastic bowls half full of red cabbage and rhubarb jam. Cutlery noises blend with the utterances of the personnel who alternately raise and deepen their voices to make themselves heard by their charges. There isn’t space for much furniture in the room, apart from an organ pushed up against a wall; the former maths teacher and organ player was allowed to keep it with her, once it seemed certain that she would never play it again.

Beside the bed there are bookshelves that bear witness to my mother’s hobby: world wars, not least World War II. There’s Napoleon Bonaparte and Attila the Hun standing side by side, and a book about the Korean War and another about Vietnam sandwiched between two leather-bound volumes marked World War I and World War II in Danish.

My visits are subject to daily rituals that are chiselled in stone and the first thing she asks me is if I’ve washed my hands.

“Did you wash your hands?”

“I did.”

“It isn’t enough to just rinse them, you’ve got to hold them under the hot tap for thirty seconds.”

It suddenly occurs to me that I was once inside her.

I’m one metre eighty-five centimetres tall and the last time I stepped onto a scale—in the locker room of a swimming pool—I weighed eighty-four kilos. Does she herself ever wonder if that big man was really inside her at one time? Where was I conceived? Probably in the old double bed, that mahogany set with the attached bedside table, the bulkiest piece of furniture in the apartment, a massive schooner.

The girl is taking away the food tray. My mother had no appetite for the dessert, prune pudding with cream.

“This is Jónas Ebeneser, my son,” I hear my mother say.

“Yes, I think you introduced us yesterday, Mom …”

The girl has no recollection of that, because she wasn’t on duty yesterday.

“Jónas means ‘dove’ and Ebeneser ‘the helpful one.’ I got to choose the names,” Mom continues.

It dawns on me that perhaps I should have asked the guy at Tryggvi’s Tattoo Parlour to place a dove beside the lily; the two doves together, me and the bird, both with a few greying hairs.

I hope the girl will have vanished before the recounting of my birth begins. But she’s not leaving because she puts down the tray now and starts to arrange the towels.

“Your birth was more difficult than your brother’s” is the next thing my mother says. “Because of the size of your head. It was as if you had two horns on your forehead, two stumps,” she explains, “like a bull calf.”

The girl gawks at me. I know she is comparing mother and son.

I smile at her.

She smiles back.

“You smelled different, you and your brother,” Mom continues from her armchair. “You smelled of clay, a cold and wet smell, cold cheeks, you were muddy around the mouth and came home with cat scratches on the back of your hands. They didn’t heal well.”

She stalls as if trying to remember her next cue in a script.

“My Pumpkin wrote an essay about potatoes when he was just eleven years old and called the essay ‘Mother Earth.’ It was about me, the essay …”

“Mom, I’m not sure she’s interested in … Sorry, what’s your name?”

“Diljá.”

“I’m not sure Diljá is interested in this, Mom …”

On the contrary, the girl seems to be genuinely interested in what Mom has to say. Nodding sympathetically, she leans against the doorframe.

“It’s incredible when you look at this hulk of a man today and think of how sensitive he was.”

“Mom …”

“If there was a bird with a broken wing in the garden he’d weep … He was an open wound … Always worried about whether people were being good enough to each other … When I’m big, he said, I want to mend the world … because the world was suffering, because the world needed to be taken care of … My Pumpkin was always so fond of the twilight … when the shadows fell, he lay on the floor by the window and stared at the clouds and sky … so musical … Then he locked himself in to make a puppet theatre … made marionettes out of wet newspapers, painted them and sewed clothes onto them, locked the door and stuffed the keyhole with toilet paper … When he was a teenager he was still worried sick about the world … I’m not going to get married unless I fall in love, he said … Then he fell for Gudrún, a nurse and the head of a ward, who then became a midwife too, and took a course in management …”

“Mom …”

Smothered by the stuffiness of the hot room I walk towards the window that overlooks the lake, a set of red lights from last Christmas blink relentlessly on the windowsill. Draped over the window, which is forbidden to be opened to allow in even the slightest draft of cold air, are the living room curtains that Mom brought with her from our old house in Silfurtún and shortened. I recognise the pattern. From that vantage point one can observe a hearse backing out with its daily cargo.