Each room has its own design but all have a fireplace, with a gilt-framed mirror over the mantle, and a forest landscape painting over the bed featuring an animal and a hunter. Their other common feature is the fact that they haven’t been heated for a long time so the same musty smell hovers in the air. There are fissures and damp patches in a number of places on the walls and cracking paint on the ceiling. The leafy wallpaper which is to be found on one or two walls of each room is worn-out and has started to peel at the seams.
I don’t mention paint to the girl, since I assume it is difficult to come by. The furniture, on the other hand, is of good quality and, on the whole, the hotel is in a pretty good state.
“Compared to the rest of the country,” as May emphasises.
I explain that, to begin with, the rooms need to be aired to get the dampness out of the walls. All of the floors have threadbare handwoven rugs and I suggest we roll them up and carry them outside to beat the dust out of them.
As we’re rolling up the first rug, beautiful turquoise tiles are revealed with peculiar square patterns reminiscent of a maze.
We stand in the middle of the floor admiring the tiling.
“Yes, I think this was the old town centre,” she says, and explains how each town has—or had—its own particular pattern, its tiling. Turquoise is the signature colour of this town and is to be found in the old neighbouring mines. This matches the information I found about the mosaic mural that no one seems to have heard of or can trace.
She circles the room looking at the tiles and I hear her say that her father was a palaeographer and some of his friends were archaeologists. I omit to tell her I drove past the ruins of the National Archive on the way to the hotel. She has nothing else to say about the tiles, but instead sinks onto the bed, bowing her head. Her palms turned upwards.
“My father was the head of the manuscript department of the National Archive and he was shot at work. We were allowed to collect his body from the street corner where it was abandoned.”
She falls silent.
“You can’t show a child his grandfather who has been shot in the head,” she adds.
I lift up the rolled carpet, lean it vertically against some corner of the room, drag over a chair and sit opposite her.
“Mom waited too long to flee,” she says in a low voice.
Could I tell this young woman in a skirt and blue blouse with two unfastened top buttons that sometimes men shall beat their swords into ploughshares? Would that sound meaningless? To say that it’s possible to be human again after being a wild beast? Or is it impossible maybe?
She pulls a handkerchief out of her pocket and blows her nose.
“Suddenly the country was crammed with weapons and one day the war was here in a flash. All kinds of stories were being told and no one could work out what was going on.”
She pauses then continues.
“We didn’t know who we were supposed to believe because everyone said the same thing, that they had been attacked by the evil forces out of the blue. Everyone said that the enemy had killed women and innocent children and showed photos of the victims. Everyone said there was no choice but to defend themselves.”
She shook her head.
“I don’t know how so much hatred spread across the community. All of a sudden everyone hated everyone.”
This makes me think of Mom. “At the core of evil, there’s a desire for revenge,” she used to say. “Hatred breeds hatred, and bloodshed leads to more bloodshed,” she’d add.
“It was no problem to die,” May finally says, looking me in the eye with quivering lips. “I wasn’t afraid of being shot or blown to pieces, but if they captured you, then you’d die a hundred times.”
HOMO HABILIS 2 (HANDYMAN 2)
She walks ahead and I follow with my toolbox.
“Fix,” she says, and I fix.
I unscrew the showerheads, and in many cases it seems to be sufficient to clear the sand and pebbles out of the pipes for the water to regain its natural pressure and colour. Then I do the same for the sinks. I suggest we get rid of the threadbare rugs and allow the tiles to shine in all their glory.
“You’re so tall you don’t need a chair to change a light bulb,” she says, as I’m standing on a chair to change a light bulb in the ceiling, and I swiftly glance at my reflection in the mirror over the fireplace. I don’t tell her that less than a week ago I stood on a chair, groping for a fixture, for a hook. The chair is wobbly and I waver as if I were on a tightrope. I’m in my red shirt and underneath it is the white water lily and underneath the water lily lies a bloody heart that is still beating. I stretch out my arms, pumping up my red chest like a bird that is about to take flight. Then I jump off the chair and reach into the bag of light bulbs.
As we’re working, she talks to me.
As she’s talking, I work.
Sometimes she abruptly stops what she is doing and says things like:
“We had a piano.”
Or she says:
“Once I found a finger on the street. It had a wedding ring on it. What was I supposed to do with a finger?”
Or:
“When I woke up, it took me one to two minutes to remember there was a war. Those were the best minutes in the day.” I calculate in my mind; Mom would have immediately answered that there are 1,440 minutes in a day.
“And if there was silence, you knew that it would all start again tomorrow.”
She also sometimes says something that makes me think: She’s
