“Me,” he says.
“Him,” she interprets.
The boy studies the box of pencils, reaches for orange, and immediately starts to draw another circle, bigger than the previous one. He adds four strokes to it, two horizontal and two vertical; another bigger human being is born and fills the sheet.
“Mom” is heard from the table.
To perfect the drawing he adds several smaller strokes, like rays, he counts five fingers on each hand and draws them carefully. He has connected the two people, they’re holding hands.
He has created two people, a small man and a big woman, and placed them under a green sun. It’s the first day of the world.
And he looked at what he had made and saw that it was very good.
His mother smiles at me. The more I try to forget that she is a woman, the more I think about it.
And there was day
The boy is generally never far away.
“Have you seen Adam?” she asks. She is bending over some papers with numbers, accounts, I assume. The boy had been playing near his mom and then suddenly vanished, evaporated.
“He was here a second ago.”
She rushes down the corridor. I hear her calling out the boy’s name. I put down my screwdriver and follow her.
“There’s no point in calling him, he doesn’t answer,” she says. She opens the door of a cupboard in the corridor.
“He sometimes crawls in here,” she says, and adds that the last time she found him behind bundles of clean bed linen and towels.
As we move between rooms, she says she is always afraid of losing Adam. She opens one bedroom door after the next and swiftly scans each room. We also look in the bathrooms and search through wardrobes and under beds.
“He crawls under tables, beds, and vanishes into nooks,” his mother explains. “He’s always looking for hiding places and I’m so scared he’ll get trapped, find some place he can’t get out of on his own.”
She kneels and looks under the bed.
When she stands up, she brushes down her skirt.
“He’s not with Fifi,” she says. “I don’t get it.”
We look on both floors. Finally, she knocks on the door of the man in the leopard socks.
She signals me to wait outside.
“Wait,” she says. “I’ll do this.”
I stand at some distance in the corridor and, after a few moments, the man opens a small slit in the door. I hear her apologise for the inconvenience and ask if he’s seen the little boy. Whether he might have come by? They exchange some words and then she disappears into the bedroom, out of my line of view. I hear a conversation and May speaks in fast, hushed tones, but I can’t make out what is being said.
After a short while she comes out holding the boy’s hand. The edges of his mouth are smudged in brown.
“He was with him,” she says with a grave air. “He gave him chocolate,” she adds by way of explanation.
And then in a low voice: “Thank you for your help.”
She bites her lower lip and confesses she isn’t just afraid for Adam, but also for her brother. “Young people like to meet out in the woods and few are willing to go out there to fetch their remains.” Those are the words the young woman uses, “young people,” like my eighty-three-year-old mother would say.
Once the mother and son have gone back to their room, I knock on my neighbour’s door.
“You don’t go near that boy,” I say.
He looks at me and grins.
“Do you have a crush on the girl? I thought you were getting off with the movie star.”
I’ve no intention of answering him, but he indicates that he has matters to discuss, that he was looking for me, in fact.
Then he immediately gets to the point and asks if I’ve managed to see the mural.
He doesn’t wait for an answer and asks straight out whether I would like to work for him.
“To obtain certain things.”
“What things?”
He sips from the glass he is holding in his hands.
“Things you have access to. People trust a person like you, who can bathe in the sunshine of a good conscience.”
I am like other people; I love, cry, and suffer
I’ve become a member of the Hotel Silence staff and have a bunch of keys.
Fifi calls me over and hands me the bundle.
“Since you are now a member of the Hotel Silence staff, we feel you should have the keys.”
In return I can stay at the hotel for an unlimited period of time, with breakfast, lunch, and goods from the hotel shop—“while the stock still lasts,” as Fifi puts it. I’m also welcome to bring my family later, says May. Fifi makes soup or an omelette at lunchtime, and in the evenings I more often than not go to the restaurant down the road. I have helped the owner with a number of odd jobs and haven’t had to pull out my wallet recently. For some reason he hasn’t mentioned the swinging doors since last week. When I get back to the hotel, I read. Yesterday I finished A Cold Spring by Elizabeth Bishop and started Fathers and Sons by Turgenev. I also look in on Fifi in the baths every day and offer him guidance on the tiling.
“It’s good to get an outsider’s eye,” he says. “Maybe I should go to school to learn this properly.”
His sister and I take a bedroom a day, and help each other to get them into shape. Then she also needs to take care of her boy.
Sometimes May stops whatever she is doing to watch
