Also by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir
Butterflies in November
The Greenhouse
HOTEL
SILENCE
Translated from the Icelandic by Brian FitzGibbon
AUĐUR AVA
ÓLAFSDÓTTIR
Copyright © 2016 by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir
English translation copyright © 2018 by Brian FitzGibbon
Cover design by nathanburtondesign.com
Excerpt from “For My Lover, Returning to His Wife” from The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton. Copyright © 1967, 1968, 1969 by Anne Sexton. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All Rights Reserved; excerpt from “Football Season Is Over” by Hunter S. Thompson used by permission of the Gonzo Trust; excerpts from “One Art” from Poems by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 2011 by The Alice H. Methfessel Trust. Publisher’s Note and compilation copyright © 2011 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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Hotel Silence was first published in Iceland by Benedikt bókaútgáfa as Ör
Published by arrangement with Éditions Zulma, Paris
ICELANDIC LITERATURE CENTER
We thank the Icelandic Literature Center for their generous financial support of this translation.
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
First Grove Atlantic paperback edition: February 2018
This book was set in 13.5 Centaur MT
by Alpha Design & Composition of Pittsfield, NH
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data available for this title.
ISBN 978-0-8021-2750-1
eISBN 978-0-8021-6559-6
Black Cat
an imprint of Grove Atlantic
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
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18 19 20 21 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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
Table of Contents
Cover
Also by Rabih Alameddine
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
HOTEL SILENCE
I. FLESH
II. SCARS
Notes
HOTEL
SILENCE
MAY 31
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.
MAY 5
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
