Evald Flisar - My Father's Dreams

“Besides, the boy’s in such a state that I couldn’t do this,” she adds in a whisper.

“We shouldn’t have taken the money,” says the dark girl.

We stand in the middle of the road, silent, shivering. No one seems to know what to do. I feel that the girls probably hate me. I wish I could just leave them and walk off, and follow the road all the way home. But that would take me at least seven hours. And I might miss Father, who is no doubt returning to pick me up. There must be a reason for his running late. I am stuck, I have to wait. In the end the black girl invites me to go with her and sleep at her place, if there is no other way, and if I want to.

Yes, it’s okay, I nod. She and Helen move away a few steps and engage in a brief conversation, gesticulating. Because of my “hypertrophy of the senses” my ears pick up their every word. They argue about the money Helen received from the engineer. The dark-haired girl wants to have it. Helen insists that it was for both of them, and she will give her no more than half.

“Then do half of what you got the money for!” the dark girl snaps back.

“You won’t have to do your half either,” Helen says. “Can’t you see he is sick in the head? Some Father, I must say, leaving him to the likes of us.”

She walks off and disappears in the night.

I follow the black-haired girl up the road. She keeps explaining that her room is very simple, and I shouldn’t be shocked. As a doctor’s son I must be used to better things. I’m only half listening. I just want to spend the night somewhere, anywhere, as long as I won’t be cold. We reach a half-ruined old house at the top of the hill, the last in the row. That’s where she lives. Sharing with an old woman, who sleeps next door. We enter a very dark room. She moves around as if looking for something. Finally she lights a battered petroleum lamp. I had never been in a house without electricity. There is a horrible smell. I feel dizzy and faint, partly, no doubt, because of the wine. The furniture is half-rotten and old. There are cobwebs on the walls. The wooden floor is full of dust. Vile-smelling clothes are strewn all over the place.

“Will you sleep next to me?” she asks, almost shyly.

Why ever not, I think to myself and start removing my clothes. The woman blows out the lamp and climbs into the bed. I climb in next to her. I hear banging noises inside my skull. I fear that the overpowering smell will prevent me from sleeping. But under the blanket I gradually begin to warm up, and the smell becomes less offensive. I can feel the woman’s hand moving and reaching toward me. Softly yet firmly she takes hold of my right hand and places it on her thigh. Still holding it, she slides it slowly towards the knee, and then slowly back towards the groin. The thigh is well-rounded, almost fat. Different from Eve’s, which is slim, firm and girlish.

“Tell me more about that attack,” the woman says from under the blanket. “You said you were attacked by your penis.”

I remain silent. That is the last thing I want to talk about, especially at this moment. She turns towards me. As she does so she lifts the blanket a little. My nostrils get the full blast of the foulest smell I have ever encountered, composed of an unwashed body, old sweat, deodorant defeated by what it was meant to disguise, and of something faintly acid and sour.

“Menstruation,” she breathes into my ear. Her wine-laden breath licks my ear-drum like a hot tongue. “It’s almost finished. It should be okay.”

The feeling of faintness grows and I lie there hovering on the edge of consciousness. In the beam of the street-light shining in through the window I see primordial monsters dancing around the bed. I close my eyes and pretend to be asleep. Under the blanket her hand is on the move once again, slithering like a snake towards my navel, where it pauses, throbbing with heat. Then it moves on towards my underpants, burrows its way inside, takes hold of my flaccid penis, pulls it out and begins to rub it.

I pretend that the penis doesn’t belong to me. That I’m not I. That I had wandered into this dream by mistake, while Father is, probably in despair, looking for me in another dream, the one we had entered together.

“Father,” I pray in my thoughts, “Father, come and take me away.”

The five-tongued snake slithers away and leaves me alone.

In despair I begin to hope it is possible to fall asleep inside a dream while actually dreaming it, and in that sleep switch to another, pleasanter dream. I surrender to the weight of exhaustion. It works: soon I begin to float across an invisible boundary into what looks like a completely new dream. I look around to find Father. But all I see are black, fast moving clouds trembling with flashes of lightning. Suddenly I hear the sound of a raging wind. As the storm approaches, a familiar unpleasant feeling sweeps over me: as if I were experiencing another attack of the penis. As it swells and begins to hurt, it is suddenly, with a single violent move, engorged by a damp, warm mouth which greedily begins to chew and swallow it. Something untidy and gasping sways above me, the head of a monster. I, too, struggle for air, my heart pounds as if trying to leap from my chest, I feel like vomiting. My penis has been attacked by a snake which is trying, with rough thrusting movements, to swallow it and digest it with its evil-smelling juices.

Finally the twitching monster above me stops, for a brief moment freezes and then shivers above me, emitting low moans for what seems like eternity. Then it moves away and collapses next to me, breathing heavily. My nostrils register a huge mound of rumpled sweaty hair. The room is spinning. I can hear thunder rumbling in the distance, there is a flash of lightning, followed by a gush of wind which rattles the window panes. I am back in the dream I tried to escape. Now I’m afraid of falling asleep again. I lie on the hard wooden frame of the bed to remain awake in a dream from which a little earlier I had sunk into the most horrible nightmare, worse than any I could ever imagine.

The storm is drawing closer. The street-lamp outside sways in the wind, and the stripes from its light quiver on the wall of the room. Wafting towards me from the body lying next to me is a vile mixture of smells. I remember that the body belongs to the black-haired girl who had brought me to the old house. I, too, smell unpleasantly: of her body, her blood, her perspiration. I would like to run away and jump head first into clear, cleansing water.

I sink into a thick haze again, hovering on the edge of consciousness. I feel betrayed; Father had taken me into a dream and then left me there without guidance. At the first sign of dawn I jump out of bed, dress in a record time, grab my shoes and stagger out into the light of the coming day. I run through the morning mist, bare feet landing on the still dewy surface of the asphalt, past the houses which lean after me like gaping carnivores smelling their first morning prey, along the road which snakes its way out of the town and toward open fields. After running for ten minutes, I see headlights emerge from the mist.

“Why didn’t you wait for me at the inn?” I hear Father’s angry voice.

At the beginning of September, a few days before the start of the new school year, Eve returned to her parents in town. I had hoped she would come and say good-bye to me, but she didn’t; her Father, a stiff-backed gentleman in a dark suit, drove her away in a black Mercedes. She never said good-bye to Father, either — except in my dream, during which I saw them among the bushes behind the health centre. She held him tightly and cried, and he kept stroking her hair. Then they kissed for a long time. It seemed to me that Father, too, had tears in his eyes. This was the first time I realised that Father actually suffered in my dreams, and for the first time I sincerely wished that they would come to an end, or that Father would cure me of this extraordinary affliction. Or, if he couldn’t, that someone else would, even, in the absence of anyone nicer, Dr Kleindienst. The unpleasant dream in which Father joined me and then abandoned me had, perhaps not surprisingly, failed to achieve its aim.