Hotel Iris (10 page)

“I have,” he said at last. “A number of times.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know … during the air raids, and someone who committed suicide on the train tracks, and in a traffic accident.” He seemed reluctant to answer and sat there pressing on his temples, trying to unravel the thread of an inexplicably tangled thought.

“But I want to know the details.”

“Why?”

“Just because,” I said. Because I thought his wife’s was among those bodies.

“Well, now that you mention it, I did see the body of a child who fell off the excursion boat about ten years ago.”

“Really? What was it like?” I moved closer and rested against him. He leaned over slightly to support my head and wrapped his arm around my back. The fence swayed. When I looked up, I saw a tiny patch of stubble that his razor had missed.

“He was a beautiful little boy, about four years old. His skin was very fair, and his hair was naturally curly. He was very well behaved and was sitting with his mother on a bench on the deck. But something must have caught his eye, a seagull diving for fish or someone riding a Jet Ski, and he went running off toward the back of the boat. In the blink of an eye, he leaned over the rail and fell in. There was nothing his mother could have done, it happened so quickly. We all saw him, but it was as though he was being dragged overboard by some sea demon. His body fell in a smooth, even arc and hit the water with a quiet splash.” His voice shook as he spoke.

“And then?” I breathed the question into his neck.

“Strictly speaking, I never saw the body. Just the boy bobbing on the waves and then sinking under them. He didn’t seem to be suffering terribly. In fact, he seemed puzzled, as though he were wondering how he had come to be in such a predicament. His mother called his name, and the other passengers gathered along the rail. Someone tossed him a life preserver, but a big wave washed over him and he was gone.”

“Did they ever find the body?”

“No.” He shook his head, and I felt his every tremor through my cheek as I leaned against his shoulder. Coming through his bones, his voice sounded clearer and calmer, as though it were welling up from the depths.

Someone dropped a cup of soda in the dirt. There was a burst of laughter, drowned out almost immediately by the band. The flags and the leaves and the lights of the stalls swayed in the cool evening breeze.

It wouldn’t have taken long for the fish to clean everything away, and now his bones glowed faintly at the bottom of the sea, the two empty eyeholes staring up at the translator and me as we made our way to the island.

“Even here, I feel as though we’re the only two people in the world,” I said.

“We’re always alone. We need no one else.” He stroked my hair, which was limp with perspiration but still pinned up in Mother’s neat bun, while his other hand worked busily at the spot on his pants. His efforts had only made the stain worse,
and I began to worry that the material would give way under his rubbing.

The fire-eater blew a stream of flame into the air. A donkey with a child on its back ambled past. The crescent moon, which had been white a moment before, glowed orange.

E I G H T

It was a hot summer, the hottest I had known. Venturing outside during the day, even for a short while, made me dizzy from the heat. The light was so dazzling that the shoreline and even the sea took on a yellowish cast. There were many cases of sunstroke down at beach, and the sirens of the ambulances could be heard at the Iris.

The guests used the showers in their rooms to cool off, and there was water running somewhere at every hour. The plants in the courtyard wilted in the heat, but the cicadas clinging to the zelkova tree sang day and night. Cracks had begun to form on the boy in the fountain.

According to the radio forecast, the heat wave had no end in sight. Our guests muttered about the weather around the breakfast table in hushed, tired voices, but they went off to the beach just the same. An open container of yogurt left out
overnight went sour overnight. Mother and the maid used the heat as an excuse to drink beer all day, and they went about their chores with red cheeks. The heat lingered into the evening, long after the sun set, and there was no sign of rain or even a breeze. It seemed as though summer would go on forever, as though the seasons had stopped changing.

One day, he ordered me to put his socks on for him. “But you can’t use your hands,” he said. Unsure exactly what he meant, I looked around the room in confusion, mopping the sweat from my face. “Only your mouth.” I quickly put my arms behind my back, understanding for the first time how much trouble hands could be.

I was terribly afraid—not that he would hurt me but that I might not please him. Would I end up being useless to him? Would I forfeit the love he had expressed in his letters because I couldn’t obey his orders? Fear welled up in me.

“You have no hands,” he said, then suddenly, lifting his leg with perfect grace and confidence, he delivered a smooth, sharp kick to the back. I lost balance and fell to my knees.

On the island, he could do what he wanted with my body, and my soul. “Wipe the sweat off your face,” he said. “Lick it.” As he spoke, he prodded my bare breasts with the tips of his fingers.

My clothes were wadded in a ball under the desk. On top, as always, the tools of the translator’s trade were neatly laid out. The novel about Marie, the dictionaries, and the notebook.
I had no idea whether he’d made any progress on the translation. It seemed as though more pages of the book had been turned, but the page in the notebook always looked the same.

He had undressed me with great skill, his movements no less elegant for all their violence. Indeed, the more he shamed me, the more refined he became—like a perfumer plucking the petals from a rose, a jeweler prying open an oyster for its pearl.

I stuck out my tongue to lick the sweat from my lips, forcing it out as far as I could until I nearly choked. Then I wiped the places I couldn’t reach on the rug. It was scratchy and burned my skin. My back ached where he had kicked me.

“That’s right,” he said. He looked larger, seen from below like this, as though his shoulders and chest had suddenly become broad and strong. But the skin was still slack on his neck, and the wrinkles creased when he spoke. “Now the socks, and be quick about it.”

I crawled to the bedroom and then struggled to my feet. But as I was about to open the wardrobe, I was kicked once again.

“How many times do I have to tell you? No hands!”

I was disgusted with myself. How could I make the same mistake? He had been so clear. I had no hands!

I took the knob on the wardrobe in my mouth. It was hard and rough and had a strange taste. No matter how hard I pulled, I couldn’t open it. He was watching me from behind, arms crossed, his eyes piercing my back, studying every detail.
He knew much more than I did about my skin—the delicate curves and hollows and clefts, the positions of the moles.

At last the hinges creaked and the door opened. The smell of mothballs filled the room. It was almost empty inside— three suits, a coat, and four neckties—and everything was perfectly pressed, hung at precisely spaced intervals. One of the suits—the one he had stained at the fair, I realized—was still in the cleaner’s plastic bag.

I looked for socks, but there were none, even in the dark recesses at the back. So I tried the little drawers inside the wardrobe, opening them one after another with my teeth. Without my hands, this body was weak and useless … clumsy, pathetic, disgraceful.

I found tiepins and sport shirts and handkerchiefs, all permeated with the smell of mothballs, but no socks. I was getting anxious. Pushing back the handkerchiefs, I used my chin to look under the shirts. I was afraid of disturbing his perfectly ordered drawer but even more afraid of failing to fulfill his demands. He made no move to help me or to excuse my pitiful efforts.

The world outside was bathed in summer sunlight. The curtains hung limp by the window. Half the lawn had turned brown from the heat, and the terrace was sharply divided, half in light and half in shadow. We were alone, and the world was silent; not the trill of a cicada or even the sound of the waves reached us here.

At last I came to the smallest drawer at the bottom of the wardrobe. By getting down on my stomach and extending
my neck, I managed to open it. Inside, I found a pocket watch, a wristwatch, cuff links, a case for eyeglasses—and in the very back, something odd: a woman’s scarf.

It was pale pink silk with a floral pattern, and of all the things I had discovered in the wardrobe, it was clearly the only one that did not belong. But not simply because it was a woman’s scarf. Something else had caught my attention, and I tried to pull it out to get a better look. The scarf was covered with dark spots, and the edges were badly tattered. I was sure the spots were blood.

“Not that!” he cried, ripping the scarf from my mouth as I raised my head in surprise. He pulled so violently that my lips burned. “Why don’t you listen to me? I said I wanted socks!”

Then he hit me. Dropping to one knee, he slapped me again and again across the face. The dry sound echoed in the silence. Warm liquid spread across my tongue, filling my mouth and spilling from between my lips. I didn’t know that blood was so warm and soft.

“You’re constantly sticking your nose in things that don’t concern you. You’re a filthy pig, a worthless bitch.” His voice was shaking with rage, and he was losing control of himself. He seemed to be dissolving into a formless fury, as he had when they’d turned us away from the restaurant. His knees, his lips, the tips of his fingers—everything seemed to tremble. The veins were throbbing at his temples. He was warping, breaking up, and from the fissures poured endless rage.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know it was so important. I just
wondered what it was and I wanted to get a better look. I won’t do it again. Please forgive me, I beg you.”

“Do you want to see what I do when you don’t obey me?” He kicked me in the side, sending me sprawling on my back, and then he quickly wrapped the scarf around my neck. “I’ll show you,” he said. “I will.”

Then he choked me. The scarf tightened around my throat, compressing bone and muscle and flesh with a sound like fabric slowly tearing. I couldn’t breath, couldn’t beg him for mercy. My legs thrashed, and I grabbed his wrist, trying unsuccessfully to loosen the scarf.

I couldn’t see his face, but I could tell that he was furious by the force of his hands behind my neck, by his groans, by the heat of his breath on my hair. I was trying to submit, but he pulled all the tighter.

“It’s your fault,” he repeated again and again, as if uttering a curse. “Why do you resist? Why don’t you listen?” But then his voice faded and the silence in the room grew heavy and deep. I caught a glimpse of the sea outside the window, but it seemed terribly far away, somewhere beyond the sky. The pain behind my eyes faded slowly to a throbbing burn, and as it did my fear of suffocation vanished. I was being strangled, but oddly I felt that he was crushing my eyes in his hands.

He had wrapped my beautiful eyes in this tattered old scarf and knotted the ends over and over to make sure they wouldn’t fall out. When he was done, he took them in his hands and began to gently squeeze them. As he did, I could
feel the membranes rupturing, the lenses splitting, liquid spilling out. The heat of my body soaked into the scarf. Finally, my eyes dissolved with a whispering sound. There was a new stain on the scarf.

Colors began to fade. Shadows spread, as if we were sinking to the bottom of the sea, and at some point I realized that pain had been replaced by a cool shadow settling over my body. I wanted to stay wrapped in this shadow forever.

The eyes of the boy who had fallen from the boat appeared before me, and though I had lost my own eyes, I could see them clearly. I wondered for the first time then whether I was going to die. I was certain that the translator’s wife had died just like this.

When I woke up, the scarf had been unknotted and slipped from my neck. It lay on the floor near my face, just a tattered square of cloth, stained and stretched out of shape, brightened only by the tiny splashes of blood that had dripped from my mouth. I tried to take a deep breath and fell into a coughing fit. I rubbed my throat, then blinked my eyes to be sure they were unharmed.

The translator was sprawled on the bed, out of breath. His hair was damp with sweat, and patches of scalp were showing through. His anger had apparently vanished, though I had no idea why.

“Now,” he said, taking my face in his hands, “the socks.”

At last I located the socks in a drawer next to the one that
held the scarf. The heels were worn, and the elastic was limp, and they smelled like dried mushrooms.

I had never seen his feet before, or for that matter any bare part of his body. My heart beat faster at the thought that my lips were going to touch him in such a place.

“What a lovely, clever mouth.” He sat down on the edge of the bed and crossed his legs. Kneeling in front of him, I brought my head to his foot and began to pull the sock over his toes. It wasn’t easy. The shape of a foot is more complicated than I had imagined, and the sock was limp and difficult to hold in my mouth.

“Now the other one,” he said, crossing his legs the other way. At some point he must have smoothed his hair and covered the bald patches.