Evald Flisar - My Father's Dreams

She sat on the bed with her legs crossed, and patted the blanket beside her; that was where she wanted me to sit, right next to her. I hesitated. I approached the bed very carefully, as if ready to bolt at any moment, and sat down on the edge, more leaning against it than sitting on it.

“Tell me about yourself,” she commanded. She placed her elbows on her knees and cupped her hands under her chin. She pressed her fingers against her cheeks, which made her pout.

“There is nothing to tell,” I said. “Nothing interesting.”

“You know what?” she said. “You’re boring. But I like you anyway. I like you because I’m bored and need to talk to someone my age. I’ll show you something.”

She bent over the edge of the bed and reached under it, pulling out a plastic bag of photographs. She poured them out onto the blanket and rummaged among them until they seemed in a bigger mess than before. She made a soft, patronising gesture with her hand.

“My life. Not very long, but already quite rich. Others write diaries, I collect pics.”

She watched me intently to see how I would react. But all I managed was a nod and a faint smile. I couldn’t relax: I was waiting with horror for the next bolt of lightning, the next rumble of thunder. I wanted to be ready, because this time I wanted to show her that I wasn’t afraid. She picked out a few snaps and stacked them up in a little pile. Then, one after another, she began to hand them to me, after examining each with a thoughtful smile. It was obvious that she wasn’t showing them for the first time; for each she had a ready-made commentary. On the first one I saw her in a group of schoolmates, with three teachers sitting in front.

“End of school-year,” she said. “I’m off to grammar school in the autumn. My dad is a bank manager, he wants me to become very clever and educated and all that. The boy on my left used to be my lover. Very helpful, he would do anything to please me. But he will go to some kind of commercial school, he had very poor marks. So our paths are diverging, as they say.”

She said that with unconcealed pride, as if ‘diverging’ was her personal achievement; one of them, for it soon became obvious that all the photographs she had selected were one way or another connected with facts or events that she hoped would impress me.

“My gang,” she passed me the next one.

Leaning against a crumbling wall of an old building in strikingly arrogant poses, right under the graffiti “Fuck off…”, I saw three skinheads trying to look aggressive. Eve was crouching in front of them on the pavement, holding a piece of cardboard on which someone had scrawled, “…or get fucked.”

I could almost feel her eyes burrowing into me to discover how deeply impressed I was. But I wasn’t really. I wanted to say that at my school we also had hooligans, yet I felt no particular desire to appear with them on a photograph. But she couldn’t contain herself, she continued before I opened my mouth.

“Nick, Vick, Mick and I, who was called Little Pick. We terrified not only the school, but the whole city quarter. For a while we stole car badges. Must have collected a thousand. Then we poured tar into our teachers’ letter-boxes. We were the first at our school to smoke marijuana. Have you ever tried?”

Without waiting for an answer she handed me the next photo. On this she was alone, seemingly on a nudist beach, stretched out on wet, compact sand, leaning on it with her right elbow. Her left leg was slightly raised and bent at the knee. The fingers of her left hand were resting on the downy mound above her “thing”. In the lower left corner, a frothy edge of the sea could be seen moving towards her. She was smiling, and the photographer had caught her just as she produced a naughty wink.

“My favourite,” she said. “Taken by Mother’s cousin. Three years ago he tried to rape me. No one knows, of course, so keep it to yourself.”

She pulled the photo from my hand and looked at it with an expression of pride and approval.

“A super snap. I have more than one copy. Once I sent one to my math’s teacher who forced me to take a repeat exam. Want to know what I wrote on the back? ‘Have a wank, you dirty old man.’ I thought he would go straight to the headmaster, but he didn’t. And I passed the exam without any trouble.”

Before she could hand me the next photo the room was lit up as if by a thousand spotlights. Judging by the sound above, the lightning must have struck very close, if not the house itself. It didn’t sound like thunder; it was more like the sky being rent apart from one end to the other. There was a clatter of broken glass, something heavy landed on hard ground and was smashed to pieces, but all this could have been caused by the wind which was turning into a hurricane: the tree tops in the orchard were flailing about like a flock of large birds that took to the air but were unable to fly away.

“Enough of that,” she said, piling all the photographs back in the plastic bag. “I can see when someone’s not really interested.” Leaning over the edge of the bed, she pushed the plastic bag out of view. Then she suddenly leapt off the bed, pulled off her T-shirt and dropped it on the floor.

“It’s unbearably hot. Won’t you take your clothes off?”

She managed to remove her skirt and panties in a single move. She tossed them in the direction of her teddy bear and looked at me visibly annoyed. No doubt she was used to having whims and desires fulfilled instantly.

“Do you really want to stay a virgin forever?” she asked. “Or is my body not good enough for you?”

Her naked body was certainly stunning, but it was so self-assured that it frightened me. Besides, my attention was suddenly drawn to a bluish mark in the crook of her arm. I was suddenly faced by an equation that I couldn’t work out. If my Father gave her injections only in my dreams, why did she have needle marks now, when I wasn’t dreaming? Or was I dreaming? Or did Father really treat her, and was that injection in my dream a coincidence? Had he not told me that she was his patient, and gave that as the main reason why I shouldn’t go near her? I was very confused. As she reached out to touch me I could see very clearly that the mark was composed of traces of many needle pricks.

“You’re such a bore,” she said. “Don’t you know how to have fun?”

The next moment the room was lit up once again, but this time the lightning flickered in the rhythm of stroboscopic lights, with Eve’s body pulsating in front of me as though we had suddenly found ourselves in a discotheque. Thunder became a deep rumble which didn’t stop but slowly intensified. I bolted out of the room and ran down the corridor. The rumble followed me all the way down the stairs to the ground floor, where it seemed to be coming from the cellar below. As I desperately tried to find a way out I suddenly came upon a sight that made me freeze.

Standing next to the window, outside which the trees swayed in the storm like giant moths, I saw a tall, dignified old man with a wavy grey beard, dressed in a dark-blue sea captain’s uniform, erect and with shoulders thrust back, with a silver-lined cap on his head, with golden stripes on the sleeves of his well-fitting jacket, holding a burning cigar in one hand and a telescope in the other. Sensing my presence, he slowly turned. This wasn’t the first time I saw Grandpa Dominic, “the old sentimental codger”, as he was referred to by Father, but never before had I seen him in uniform, and never had he looked so beautiful, almost like a god who had crossed the sea to rescue a shipwrecked soul.

“You’re Adam,” he gave me a pleasant smile. “The doctor’s son.”