Evald Flisar - My Father's Dreams

“Nice smell,” Father quipped, but Mother said, “Oh shut up.”

The receptionist turned around as if he had predicted the moment the smell would make me swoon. He gave me a brief scornful look. Then he transferred his gaze to Father and with a sticky voice explained that it wasn’t his fault; the season had ended, there were no guests, the hotel had been put in mothballs.

“I don’t remember anyone staying at the hotel at this time of year for more than ten years,” he said before panting on.

“If that were so,” I heard Father mutter behind me, “the hotel would have been closed a long time ago.”

On the landing the receptionist produced a bunch of keys and unlocked the nearest door. As he opened it and waved us into the room, the smell of naphthalene wafted towards us with a double force. I felt sick at the thought that I would have to breathe it in for a week.

“You’ll have to open the window,” I heard the receptionist’s unctuous voice, “for the smell to escape. But if it won’t, there’s nothing much you can do, it’s the time of year when mothballs take over.”

Suddenly Mother unloaded one of her silly remarks, for at certain decisive moments she simply couldn’t help contributing something outrageously stupid and unhelpful: she said that the smell wasn’t so bad, really, we would just have to put up with it! For her it was enough that we were at the sea, finally together at the sea, and for that she was prepared to sleep on the floor, in the loo even!

“Where is the sea?” Father asked as he parted the curtains.

We were staring at the steep wall of a towering grey rock. Oh, said the receptionist, the sea is on the other side, but there the rooms are much smaller, and the smell of mothballs ten times worse. What is more, the rooms had not been properly cleaned after the departure of the last group of tourists; but if we ourselves wanted to clean one we were welcome to it; if we could make do with a single bed, that is.

“No,” Mother decided, “we shall stay here.”

That was her second stupid remark. But it wasn’t just her remark that drove me out of the room; it was the sickly smell, and Father’s unusual indifference. I promised to wait for them outside. I knew very well what they would do. Mother would open our suitcases and travel bags, she would put every single thing that we brought with us into the most suitable place; then she would take a shower, change her clothes, comb her hair; and she would do all that with special eagerness, almost with love. I knew it would take at least an hour for her to conclude this ritualistic succession of moves which to me seemed so empty of meaning. Father, in the meantime, complaining of sudden bowel cramps, would lock himself in the loo, together with the newspaper he had bought for the purpose, as soon as we arrived.

I waited for them in front of the hotel, sitting on the stone wall, dangling my legs above the sea. It spread out before me like a tired body of stagnant water, grey and lifeless, weighed down by the flotsam of the summer months. There wasn’t a sail in sight. The promenade was empty, most shops were closed. The general atmosphere became even more depressing when we had lunch in the large dining room. They gave us a table near the rear wall, so that the waiter, in order to reach us, had to cross the entire empty hall. That could have been a coincidence, but I soon realised that in the side wall not far from our table was an archway leading to the main corridor. Coming and going along this corridor were an incredible number of hotel’s employees, far too many considering that we were the only guests: cooks, waiters, washer-women, chambermaids and the like. That, too, could have been a coincidence, for they seemed busy carrying things from one end to the other, but their openly curious glances were sufficient evidence that it was us they wanted to see: us, three belated tourists, extravagant fools worthy of scorn, which the passers-by did very little to hide.

My conjecture was confirmed when a terrible quarrel erupted in the kitchen. From the words that reached us it was just possible to make out that the waiters were fighting for the right to serve us. We must have appeared so strange that they all wanted to get the closest possible look at us. They obviously reached no agreement, because they kept coming in turn: one brought the cutlery, another the napkins, the third soup, the fourth potatoes, and so on. Mother thought that their unusual interest was no more than a sign of their hospitality, and, of course, our importance.

“Yes,” Father said, “a country doctor, his ledger clerk wife, and their mentally deranged son, important guests indeed.”

“Don’t you ever say that again,” Mother spluttered, nearly choking on a piece of roast potato. “If anyone, it is you who is deranged.”

“I may well be,” Father said. “I just hope you won’t be surprised if I behave accordingly.”

After lunch we went for a walk. We walked along the gently curving pebbly beach from one end to the other, only to turn and walk back the same way. The tired sea heaved against the shore like a restless swamp. The colour of the rocky hills behind the town was deathly grey, the rocks did not glisten, and even the sunlight was unusually pale. All this was deceptive, of course, I could feel very strongly that the seeming indifference was hiding scorn, even hatred, for every now and then it became obvious that the thick, exhausted sea was trying to swallow us. The tiny pebbles under our feet offered very uncertain support for our shoes, they kept sliding from underneath them, and it wasn’t long before I felt that the earth, too, was trying to suck us into its lower depths.

There was an immense difference between this and the image of the resort I remembered from three years earlier. During our previous holiday it had been green, restless, throbbing with life. Observed from the lower end of the beach, it had seemed to resemble a large living being, dressed in the garish colours of foreign tourists who walked up and down the promenade, argued about the price of a donkey ride along the beach, thronged in front of kiosks, shouted, chatted and laughed, freely exposing large sunburned bellies. Everywhere one could feel the excited unease of shy children who had come to the sea for the first time and were staring with awe at its windy turbulence, and the giggly joy of young girls licking ice-cream, turning the pages of girlie magazines or smearing their bodies with sun lotion.

But now it was different. Now we were alone with the dull, threatening sea. A cold wind had begun to sweep across it. As we reached the first houses I heard the shrieking of gulls above us. But as I looked up I could see nothing, just an empty pale sky. My anxiety grew. All the signs pointed to imminent danger. I felt a sudden urge to ask Father to take us away from this town as soon as possible.

Near the hotel Mother suddenly developed an urge to eat bananas.

“Bananas?” Father couldn’t believe it. “In this place? At this time of year?”

But Mother insisted; I should go to the market and get some, while she and Father would go to the room and take a little rest. I looked at Father. He shrugged and looked away. Then he walked towards the hotel like a huge obedient dog. Mother gave me some money and quickly followed him. I ran towards the centre of the town, knowing quite well that no one would be selling bananas in the middle of September, not in this little town, not in this unearthly atmosphere in which everything seemed so unusual and displaced. I knew that bananas were merely Mother’s excuse for getting rid of me. But I felt a great surge of relief myself. The thought passed my mind that perhaps it was Mother who was the source of my feelings of impending doom.