Hotel Iris (14 page)

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 fingers 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.”

“I suppose it’s a souvenir of sorts, even though it took his wife from him. Eventually, he disappeared, and by the time I heard the story, no one knew where to find him. But we met up again by chance the year I entered university. He seemed delighted to have found me, and he spoiled me rather shamelessly. Even though, as you’ve seen from my story, he had been willing for me to die that day long ago.”

“Are the stories he tells about you as a child true?”

“I told him all those stories; he exaggerates a bit. It’s another form of penance, I suppose—to erase that one moment in the past. He knows it’s pointless, but he can’t help himself. As soon as he sees me,
he falls back into the pattern … sometimes grateful that I can’t talk.”

He had written so much I began to worry that he would run out of paper. My worrying grew almost uncontrollable— there was still so much more I wanted to know about the translator, if only his nephew could go on handing me notes forever.

The setting sun illuminated his profile. His lips remained tightly sealed. The chain around his neck glistened with sweat.

It suddenly occurred to me that he would be old one day, just like the translator. I tried to picture him with wrinkled skin, slack muscles, and thinning hair, but no image came to me. No matter how carefully I studied him, I could not find the shadow of age on his body.

I looked at my watch. The bus would arrive in less than ten minutes.

“When are you leaving?” I asked.

“Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow? Your uncle will be sad to see you go.”

“No, he’ll be happy to get back to his normal routine.”

“And will you come back next summer?”

“I’m not sure when I’ll be back. I’m going to study in Italy this fall.”
He touched the paper to be sure the paint had dried and then closed his sketchbook. He put away his brushes in
the paint box and tipped the cup of water into the sea. The waves carried away the cloud of colors.

“Does it seem strange to you?” I asked. He stopped for a moment and turned to me with a questioning look. “The fifty-year difference in our ages. You couldn’t call it normal.”

“It doesn’t seem strange to me. I’m happy for both of you. And I’m happy I got to meet you.”
I didn’t know how to respond, so I helped him replace the caps on the tubes of paint.
“I’ve been coming to this town for years now, but you’re the first person I’ve ever spoken to other than my uncle.”

“But I worry sometimes. We have no future together, and I’m afraid everything will end with summer.”

“Everything will work out,”
he wrote.
“Don’t be afraid of breezes and scarves.”
He pressed this last note into my hand, which was overflowing now with his words. We started to stand up, but our footing on the rock was unsteady and we nearly fell into the sea. Then, suddenly, we were embracing. I’m not sure whether I stumbled and he reached out to steady me, or whether we were embracing even before I lost my balance. I felt as though the waves had stopped.

We kissed. Our lips met without hesitation, as though we had each decided long ago that it would happen. My hand still clutched the sheaf of notes. The pendant dangled against my chest, a cool thing between our warm bodies.

When I asked him to come with me to the Iris, he couldn’t answer; his pendant was trapped between us. But he blended
in with the two groups of guests I met at the bus stop and followed me up to the hotel. It was an adventure. He played the part of a mute young man on a trip to do some sketching. I put one of the groups in 204 and the other in 305. Then I gave him the key to 202—the room the translator and the prostitute had used. In the register it had been stamped with the red cancellation mark.

Some children were running around the lobby, ignoring their parents’ attempts to calm them down. Another group of guests had spread out a map on the front desk to look for a restaurant. He took advantage of the confusion to slip up to the room.

The light was dim in Room 202, the windows clouded with steam from the processing plant next door. The sound of the machine that mixed the fish paste was barely audible. The beds were made up. The Bible and the telephone were on the night table, a box of tissues had been set in front of the mirror, a corkscrew and a chipped glass were arranged on top of the refrigerator—everything in its appointed place. But the people who were supposed to stay here tonight had called to cancel this morning.

He was in no hurry. Nor was he made anxious by the sound of voices in the hallway or footsteps on the stairs. He took his time as he touched me. The sketchbook and paint box lay abandoned under the bed.

He did not tie me up; he did not hit me. Nor did he give me a single command. I did have trouble breathing, as I had with the translator, but this time it was from the weight of
his broad chest pressing down on mine. His fingers ran over my body as skillfully as they scrawled the characters in his notes. His hip bones were hard against my thighs.

The bed groaned so loudly I worried that they would be able to hear it downstairs. Someone was gargling in the room above us. The bell on the front desk rang. The warmth of his body filled me.

He let out a muffled cry, and I knew it was over. I was certain it was his voice. The faintest cry, lodged deep in his chest, suddenly escaped through his parted lips.

“Would you show me your tongue?” I asked. He climbed back into the T-shirt and pants he had discarded on the other bed, and then he put his pendant back around his neck.

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

He took hold of my shoulders and then cautiously opened his mouth. It was dark inside—no tongue, just a black cavity. The darkness was so deep that I felt dizzy staring down into it.

Just at that moment, there was an irritated cry from the lobby.

“Mari! Mari! Where are you?” It was Mother. Footsteps came running up the stairs and then down the hall toward our room. In an instant, I had grabbed the sketchbook and paint box and pushed him ahead of me into the closet. The box clattered against the wall. My body stiffened and I clung to him. Mother knocked on the door of Room 201.