Hotel Iris (3 page)

The Iris came into being when my great-grandfather fixed up an old inn and turned it into a hotel. That was more than a hundred years ago. In that part of town, a restaurant or hotel was either supposed to have an ocean view or to be right on the beach. The Iris didn’t qualify on either count: it took more than half an hour to walk to the sea, and only two of the rooms had views. The rest looked out over the fish-processing factory.

After Grandfather died, Mother made me quit school to help at the hotel. My day begins in the kitchen, getting ready for breakfast. I wash fruit, cut up ham and cheese, and arrange tubs of yogurt in a bowl of ice. As soon as I hear the first guests coming down, I grind the coffee beans and warm the bread. Then, at checkout time, I total the bills. I do all of this while saying as little as possible. Some of the guests try to make small talk, but I just smile back. I find it painful to speak to people I don’t know, and besides, Mother scolds me if I make a mistake with the cash register and the receipts are off.

The woman who works for us as a maid comes just before noon, and she and Mother begin cleaning the guest rooms. In the meantime, I straighten the kitchen and the dining room. I also answer the phone to take reservations, or to talk
to the linen company or the tourist board. When Mother finishes the cleaning, she comes to check on me. If she finds even one hair out of place, she immediately combs it down. Then we get ready to welcome the new guests.

Most of my day is spent at the front desk. The space behind the desk is so small and cramped you can reach just about anything you need without moving—the bell, the old-fashioned cash register, the guest book, the pen, the phone, the tourist pamphlets. The counter itself is scarred and dark from all the hands that have touched it.

As I sit slumped behind the desk, the smell of raw fish drifts in from the factory across the way, and I can see the steam from the machines that make fish paste seeping through gaps in the factory windows. Stray cats are always gathered under the delivery trucks, waiting for something to spill from the flatbeds.

My senses seem sharpest when the guests are all checked in, settled in their rooms getting ready for bed. From my stool behind the desk, I can hear and smell and feel everything happening in the hotel. I can’t say I have much experience or even any real desires of my own, but just by shutting myself up behind the desk, I can imagine every scene being played out by the people spending the night at the Iris. Then I erase them one by one and find a quiet place to lie down and sleep.

———

A letter from the translator arrived on Friday morning. The handwriting was very beautiful. Taking refuge in the corner behind the desk, I read it as discreetly as I could.

My Dear Mari,

Please forgive me for writing to you like this, but it was such a great and unexpected pleasure to speak with you on Sunday afternoon in the waiting room at the dock. At my age, few things are unexpected, and one spends considerable effort avoiding shocks and disappointments. I don’t suppose you would understand, but it is the sort of mental habit you develop when you reach old age.

But this past Sunday was different. Time seemed to have stopped, and I found myself being led to a place I had never even imagined.

It would be only natural that you despise me for the disgusting incident I provoked at the hotel, and I had been hoping even before we met to make a proper apology. But the open and completely unguarded way you looked at me left me so bewildered that I was unable to say anything to the point. Thus, I wish to offer you my apologies in this letter.

I have lived alone for a long time now, and I spend my days locked away on the island with my translations. I have very few friends, and I have never known a beautiful girl like you. It has been decades since anyone waved good-bye to me the way you did. I have walked along
that dock countless times, but always alone, never once having cause to turn back to look for anyone.

You waved to me as if I were an old friend, and that gesture—insignificant to you—was enormously important to me. I want to thank you … and thank you again.

I come into town every Sunday to do my shopping, and I will be in front of the flower clock in the plaza about two o’clock in the afternoon. I wonder whether I shall have the good fortune to see you there again. I have no intention of trying to extract a promise from you—think of my request as simply an old man’s ramblings. Don’t give it a second thought.

The days seem to grow steadily warmer, and I suspect you will be busier at the hotel. Please take care of yourself.

P.S. I know it was rude of me, but I took the liberty of finding out your name. By coincidence, the heroine of the novel I am translating now is named Marie.

T W O

“How good of you to come,” he said as soon as he saw me.

“No, not at all,” I said.

Then he stared at his feet, seeming more confused than pleased. He fiddled nervously with the end of his necktie, searching for something else to say.

We stood for a while, listening to the accordion. The boy was playing, just as he had last week. I don’t know whether the songs were the same, but they had the same low, ragged sound. Only a few coins had been tossed into his case. The long hand of the flower clock pointed to the five, which was made out of salvias.

“Shall we walk a bit?” said the translator, taking a coin from his pocket. He dropped it with a clatter in the case as we set off.

The shore road was in the full bloom of summer. The bars
and restaurants had opened their terraces, ice cream stands had sprung up here and there, and the workmen had begun assembling the bathhouses on the beach. The sea was covered with boats, the sunlight glittering on their sails. And yet all the brilliance of the season did not touch the translator. He wore his usual dark suit and plain tie. His clothes were neat and tidy but somehow tired.

We walked away from the dock, wandering along the road.

“Is the hotel full today?”

“No, we have just three rooms booked. That’s disappointing for a Sunday, but it’s because the high tide will be covering up the seawall. …”

“I suppose that’s right.”

“How long have you lived on the island?”

“More than twenty years now.”

“Always by yourself?”

“Yes …”

We spoke little to one another, but I was acutely conscious of the translator’s body next to me. Out of the corner of my eye, I followed his smallest movements—swerving to avoid a lamppost, brushing a thread from his suit, or coughing quietly as he looked down at the pavement.

I suppose I was watching him so carefully because I had never really walked next to anyone before. My father had died while I was quite young, and my mother always walked ahead of me. I’d never had a boyfriend, or even girlfriends, to
walk with in town. I was confused and a bit embarrassed to have another body next to mine.

“I doubted you’d come,” he said. We had reached the end of the cape and sat down on a bench.

“Why?”

“Why would a seventeen-year-old girl want to spend her Sunday with an old man like me?”

“But if I stayed home, I would just have to work. And who wouldn’t want to go for a walk with someone who’s so pleased by a little wave good-bye?”

The truth was I couldn’t bear to think about the translator standing there at the flower clock all by himself. If I had ignored his letter and sat behind the front desk as two o’clock passed, I wouldn’t have been able to think of anything else. I had seen him left standing alone at the Iris, exposed to the curious stares of the other guests, and I didn’t want that scene repeated in the park on my account.

“The Marie in your Russian novel,” I said. “What’s she like?”

“She’s a beautiful and intelligent woman. She rides well and makes intricate lace. Somewhere in the novel it says that she is ‘as lovely as a flower petal touched by the morning dew.’ ”

“Then only our names are similar.”

“This Marie falls in love with her riding master, and their love is the most sublime and intense in all the world.”

“She sounds less and less like me.”

“The moment I saw you at the hotel, I thought of that other Marie. You were so much like how I see her, as I’m translating the novel. You can only imagine how shocked I was when I learned that your name is Mari.”

“My father gave me that name.”

“It’s lovely. And it suits you perfectly.” He crossed his legs and squinted out at the sea. I felt as though my father had paid me a compliment.

Few tourists came out to the end of the cape, and the benches nearby were empty. The wildflowers blooming on the hillside arched in the breeze. A fenced path led up the hill behind us, offering views of the sea all the way to the top.

The shore road stretched on into the distance. The high tide lapped at the seawall, and the translator’s island was dimly visible in the distance.

“I’ve never read a Russian novel,” I said.

“When my translation is finished, you’ll be the first to see it.”

“But I won’t understand it.”

“I’m sure you will. It’s straightforward enough.”

“Could I find other books you’ve translated at the library?”

“No, I’m afraid not. You see, I’m not a real translator, the sort a publisher would commission to do a novel.” I had never thought about what it meant to be a “real” translator, but he seemed so sad as he made this confession. “I translate guidebooks and commercial pamphlets and a column for a magazine.
Sometimes I do advertisements for medicines, manuals for electronic devices, business correspondence, even Russian recipes. It’s quite dull. As for Marie’s novel, no one asked me to translate it—it’s for my own amusement.”

“But I think it’s wonderful—helping people understand things they could never know otherwise!”

“No one has ever put it that way.”

The awkwardness between us had begun to ebb, and from time to time I glanced over at him as I asked him questions. He had stopped fidgeting with his tie, but he remained as timid as ever. I thought at first that he was still embarrassed by what had happened that night at the hotel, but it slowly dawned on me that he was simply afraid an errant word or look would cause the girl sitting next to him to dissolve into thin air. It seemed strange to me that he could be so fearful at his age.

He brushed a blade of grass from the bench. When he noticed a cabbage moth hovering around the flowers at his feet, he pulled back his legs to avoid disturbing it. There were age spots on his hands, and the knot of his tie sunk into the wrinkles on his neck. His face was ordinary, but his ears were remarkable.

“Do you have a family?” I asked.

“No,” he said. It was, in fact, difficult to imagine the kind of family that had raised him, what kind of parents he’d had, or even the house where he lived on the island. He seemed to exist outside of time, as though he had just appeared from nowhere on the landing at the Iris. “I was married once, when
I was thirty-five, but my wife died three years later. After that I moved to the island.”

The sky brightened and it grew warm. A couple strolled by—little more than footsteps in gravel, close and then far away. I wondered what we looked like to them. A grandfather and his granddaughter? A teacher and his pupil? Or could they see that there was no link of any kind between us?

A steady breeze blew off the water, and I had to pat down my skirt from time to time. Whitecaps flecked the waves.

“If you’re warm, you should take off your jacket,” I said.

“No, I’m fine like this.”

We stared out at the sea in silence, more at ease with each other than before—as if the silence had become a soft veil covering the two of us.

The waves crashed at our feet. Shorebirds cried out in the distance. Beneath the veil, the sounds were wonderfully clear and distinct, even the quiet rasping of the translator’s breath.

“I suppose I should be getting back,” I said at last.

“Thank you for coming today,” he said.

The waiting room at the dock was less crowded, perhaps because it was later in the day. The loudspeaker urged passengers to board.

“Would you be so kind as to wave again today?”

“Of course.”

A faint smile brightened his eyes for a moment and then faded.

“Thank you,” he said again, reaching out to touch my cheek with the tips of his fingers. My breath caught in my throat and I stiffened. The feeling was not unpleasant—his gesture had been a natural expression of gratitude—but my heart was beating so hard it was almost painful. I looked down, unsure how to respond. His fingers passed lightly over my ear and lingered in my hair.

“Lovely,” he said. I realized he was trembling, though it was only my hair he was touching. I stared at the floor, unable to move, worrying that my hair still smelled of camellia oil. What if he disliked it as much as I did?

The rays of the setting sun fell across the pier. I waved from the window of the waiting room, just as I’d promised. It no longer seemed ridiculous—in fact, I felt it was the most important thing I could be doing at that moment.