Evald Flisar - My Father's Dreams

I nodded and moved towards him. Although the rumble had ceased I felt that he alone could protect me. For a while his warm eyes rested on me with frank curiosity. His beard was very long; it must have taken him years to grow it. He leaned forward a little as if unable to see me in the semi-darkness. Then he straightened up, put the cigar to his lips and drew on it, and puffed the smoke toward the invisible ceiling.

“Don’t be afraid,” he said, in a voice which was surprisingly soft for a man of his size. “This little fury is nothing compared to the storms I survived at sea. But one must always be ready.” He weighed the telescope in his hand, as though he had been using it to observe conditions far in the horizon, and not merely the flailing branches in the orchard, the nearest of which kept scraping at the window pane.

“Sit down,” he waved with the cigar toward the wicker chair in front of the window. “Tell me what’s troubling you.”

He made four measured steps across the room and sank into an armchair next to a large oak table. He placed the telescope on top of a pile of old newspapers. He clenched the cigar with his teeth and with the thumb and forefinger rolled it from side to side as it glowed in the dark.

Suddenly the room was lit up by lightning. At that moment I saw, lined against the wall behind him, the statues of African gods he had collected on his many sea trips. The statues about which almost everyone in the village had made at least one derisory or stupid remark, although no one had ever seen them. Some villagers even claimed that the old man was a witch and should be forbidden to come to the shop. There were twelve gods, standing next to one another, all two metres tall, with very long noses, with stumps instead of arms, some with huge breasts, others with jutting penises, all with white painted eyes which seemed to follow my every move. Captain Dominic sat in front of them like an interpreter of their thoughts, and of my thoughts for their benefit, an intermediary between their sea of eternity and my little island of restlessness. I felt that these gods knew the tiniest secret, and would not take kindly to anyone pretending in front of them.

“Dreams,” I said. “I’m troubled by evil dreams.”

There was a moment of silence. Outside, too, it grew very quiet; as if the storm had been forced to take a deep breath, as if thunder were afraid to interrupt Grandpa Dominic’s answer. There were two flashes of lightning without any thunder, and in their light I could see that the black gods, too, were waiting in great suspense. It seemed that the whole of creation wanted to hear what the captain would say.

Finally, flicking ashes off the end of the cigar with his middle finger, he said very simply, “I’m listening.”

I understood his words as an order. So I began. Nothing could stop me. I told him everything from the beginning, everything I had already told my little brother Abortus and written down in my diary. I described what happened on the wall of the dam, and all the dreams that followed, up to the last one in Father’s surgery. I spoke rapidly, with words tumbling over one another, and a couple of times Grandpa Dominic had to remind me, “Slowly, Adam, slowly.”

I resumed my story, retelling it by adding more details, as if afraid that otherwise he wouldn’t believe it. But every time there was a flash of lightning I saw that he listened with great attention, even forgetting to smoke his cigar. I could see that the gods behind him listened just as intently, and that their eyes slowly narrowed until finally their whiteness faded and they remained standing there as if my story had killed them.

“You really are drowning,” said the old captain. “And not a ship in sight.”

From the corner of my eye I suddenly noticed that he wasn’t alone in listening to my breathless words. Standing in the corridor, half hidden behind the door post, was Eve, whose eyes, during one of the flashes of lightning, glowed like the eyes of a wild cat.

For the next three days Father behaved very strangely. Even Mother noticed the shadow of some secret worry that seemed to have descended upon him. He was detached and twice as explosive as usual: a shirt button, refusing to yield immediately to his hasty fingers, was enough to make him livid. He stopped reading and listening to classical records, he stayed at work longer than was his habit, and when he returned he wandered around the orchard with hands in his pockets, pausing occasionally to stare at the ground in front of his feet. Once, through the window in my room, I saw him sitting on the step of the garden shed, nervously smoking a cigarette, the first time I ever saw him doing that. A few times I caught him watching me from the corner of his eye, but mostly he moved about the house as if trying to avoid me.

In the morning I heard him slip in the bathroom while showering; there was a thud, followed by a loud curse. Then I heard Mother hurrying from the bedroom to see what had happened. I heard them talking behind the closed door for almost ten minutes. She was trying to comfort him, while his voice seemed almost meek compared to his usual authoritative tone. Later that day he returned from work with a large plaster above his left eye and with the look of murder in his eyes, softened by almost pitiful bitterness. I felt sorry for him, especially in the evening when he remained sitting in front of the telly without watching it, with arms hanging loosely over the sides of the armchair, staring at the carpet and occasionally at the door, as if waiting for someone to come and tell him what was happening, and why.

Three days later we received a visitor, a gaunt man with a nervous gait and abrupt, awkward gestures. The top of his head was completely bald, but attached to the back of it was a dry growth of greying, mousy hair reaching all the way to his shoulders and leaving on his jacket scattered traces of dandruff. He was failing to make a good impression in several other ways: he walked by swaying his hips as if tip-toeing, and when he listened he thrust his head forward as if afraid that he might not catch every word. Before speaking, however, he jerked it backwards, and the tip of his tongue pushed its way through the gap in his teeth as if making sure it was safe to open his mouth. His first sentence was always followed by short, abrupt laughter, which could mean either that he considered himself to be witty or that he didn’t quite mean what he said. He seemed to be permanently on guard; as if afraid that someone might throw a rotten egg in his face.

That might have been happening to him at the grammar school in the nearby town, where he was supposed to teach psychology. Mother, who was obliged to cook dinner for this unpalatable guest, expressed serious misgivings about the possibility of this being true. She said that the man had lost his medical licence for abusing a female patient at a mental institution where he worked as a psychiatrist. Would anyone employ a person like that? No, he was making ends meet with a private psychoanalytic practice. To see what success he is having with that, she said pointedly, we need only to look at the state of his clothes, which are worse than the worst worn by anyone in the village.

“Not to mention the state of the old jalopy in which he arrived,” she concluded.

The invitation to dinner had come from Father, who had described the man as a friend from his student days, then a young medical prodigy with a special talent for interpreting dreams. Life had evidently not been very kind to him, quite the contrary, but fortunately it had left this special ability of his completely intact.

“After all he writes articles on the subject of dreams for various publications,” Father had said.