Evald Flisar - My Father's Dreams

“Well?” she demanded of Father. “Have you excluded that possibility?”

Father poured himself a glass of wine, the tenth that evening, and raised it to his lips. Over the glass he gave me a look which conveyed what I took to be a plea for help. He took a sip, put the glass down and said, “Of course I have, I’m a doctor, am I not, that was the first possibility I considered.”

Mother took a step toward the table; she stopped wiping the plate and let it hang in her hand, pressing the cloth against her stomach as if trying to quell a cramp. “And what were the other possibilities?”

“Don’t expect me to give you clinical details,” Father snapped, “you’d hardly know what I was talking about, or have you studied medicine without telling me?”

“No,” Mother replied and turned on her heel like a soldier, “I have not. Nor have I ever been struck off the register.” And she marched off into the kitchen, holding the plate as if about to throw it at someone’s head.

“Madam,” Dr. Kleindienst leaned toward the door like a huge praying mantis, “brain can be damaged by quite ordinary events. Falling from a tree, for example. Walking into a lamppost. Being hit by a ball during a game of soccer. By eating poisoned mushrooms. The human brain is the last great mystery in the Universe.”

“You said this of dreams a moment ago,” Mother returned without the plate and the cloth; now she had a glass of wine in her hand.

“Same thing,” Dr. Kleindienst jerked his head sideways as if resenting having to simplify his words for the sake of an ill-educated woman; he looked at Father with an expression that was not far from pity.

“In any case, if I may say so, Madam, considering that your dinner was very good, it is your husband, the doctor, who should be the final arbiter in these matters. It’s true that Adam is your son, too, but we’re facing things here that are unusual even for the profession.”

Mother looked at him as if she had never heard anything so half-baked. Then she asked me if I had ever fallen from a tree, banged my head against anything, had a ball thrown at me or anything else that could have caused damage to my brain. I said I couldn’t remember any such events; all I could say was that a certain dream of mine began to repeat itself after Father had hit me and I lost consciousness. But I couldn’t say that Father’s blow really damaged my brain; as far as I was concerned there seemed nothing wrong with it.

I realised at once that I should not have mentioned the episode on the dam; I could see that by the look in Father’s eyes. But it was too late.

“It was nothing, really,” I quickly added.

“Of course it was nothing,” Father dismissed the whole thing.

“In fact I didn’t lose consciousness, it only seemed so, because of the heat,” I said.

“You can’t damage someone’s brain by slapping their face,” Father concluded.

“Just a minute,” Mother said and put her still untouched glass of wine on the table. “I understand less and less. No surprising, really, being no more than an unschooled accounts clerk.”

“Don’t exaggerate,” Father said.

“And you stop treating me as if I were a fool!” Mother shouted. I could see tears in her eyes. “You come to me and say, listen, Adam hasn’t stopped dreaming. He dreams in the middle of the day, and some of his dreams keep coming back. It could be serious. Then you invite a friend who is supposed to know about such things, a dream expert, you call him. Then you both try to convince me that this could be due to brain damage. Now, suddenly, you’re trying to convince me of the exact opposite. And finally I even learn that you slapped Adam. When? Why?”

“Hardly worth mentioning,” Father waved his hand.

“I want to know,” Mother insisted, with tears now streaming down her cheeks.

“Have I no right to slap my fourteen-year old son if I think that’ll do him good? Tell me. Am I, or am I not his Father? Because you, on the other hand, keep bugging and criticising him. Adam take off you shoes, Adam put on your shoes, Adam where have you been, Adam where’re you going, Adam why don’t you eat, Adam what’s that you’re reading, Adam what are those marks on your sheet, Adam why are you shaming me in front of the teachers? Have you ever thought he might be seeking refuge in dreams to escape your incessant nagging?”

Their faces were only three inches apart. I could see that one of Mother’s tears fell on the back of the hand with which Father was gripping the edge of the table. Although he winced slightly, he tried to give the impression that he was not aware of what happened.

Mother straightened up, reached for her glass and drained it. She refilled it from the bottle on the table and picked it up with her right hand, while awkwardly wiping the tears off her face with the back of the left one. Then she walked back into the kitchen, stooped under the weight of emotion. She left the door open. I thought I heard a loud sob, but then everything was quiet again.

Father shrugged, and Dr. Kleindienst shook his head in sympathy. They both looked at me. I reached under the table and pretended to fiddle with the straps of my sandals.

“Can I go to my room?” I asked.

“No,” Father said, “we’re talking about you.”

As they continued, they mentioned a number of things, including the possibility that my dreams could be an outcome of fantasy. Not of passive dreaming, but of phantasie in the ancient Greek sense of the word. Dr. Kleindienst pulled a biro from his breast pocket and wrote it down on his paper napkin. He explained that to ancient Greeks the word meant “that which makes visible”. The psychological function of fantasy was to make visible the hidden dynamics of the unconscious part of the human psyche. In other words, the sexual scenes I relived in my mind might not be dreams in the true sense of the word. They might be something that my unconscious beamed into my conscious mind to acquaint me with the desires I would not otherwise dare admit. They concluded with an agreement that, while there was no reason to panic, I should be kept under observation, in case treatment became necessary at some later stage.

Finally, late in the evening, Father invited Dr. Kleindienst to go with him to the health centre where he wanted to show him some of his experiments. I followed them out and watched them get into their cars. It was pleasantly cool; the sky was filled with stars, and hanging low above the hills was a sliver of the moon. It was nearly midnight. As two pairs of rear lights flickered off and disappeared among the trees, I suddenly became aware of Mother standing behind me. I turned and saw that she was smoking again. This time her decision to give up cigarettes had lasted no more than a week. Her breath smelled of alcohol. Next to the wine, she must have secretly devoured half a bottle of brandy.

“Tell me about your dreams,” she said.

It came out all by itself, without any desire on my part to lie. In fact, I was more astonished by the words I heard myself saying than she must have been. I said that Father had every reason to worry. My dreams, which might indeed be fantasies rather than dreams, were horrible, perverse. They concerned the sea captain’s granddaughter, who was spending her holidays with him. We were meeting wherever we could, in the nearby wood, in the orchard behind the house, in the bushes on the banks of the stream. And when we were together, we took off our clothes and did those things.

“What things?” Mother held her breath.

“Those that are done by lovers in films,” I said. “Those thrusting movements. That joining of mouths and other parts of the body.”

Mother exhaled very loudly and said nothing for almost a minute. Then she said, hoarsely, “Oh my God, Adam. Is that what it is?”