Evald Flisar - My Father's Dreams

Just below the school I turned right into the wood, and walked through it, following the path along which Eve had taken me to Grandpa Dominic’s house for the first time. I could still remember every detail of that walk, every smell, every slant of the sun rays, and I could see Eve’s image dancing before me as clearly as if she were there. I walked on air, filled with anticipation to which I could not put a name. As I walked up the driveway towards the door I suddenly noticed the huge statue of one of the African gods. It was standing on the grass near the corner of the house, and it was the largest and most fearsome of the twelve tribal deities, a hermaphrodite with a jutting penis and large, pendulous breasts, with eyes that seemed to follow my every move me as I walked to the door.

“I’m a bearer of gifts,” I explained as I walked up the stairs.

It was past nine o’clock, but Eve was still fast asleep, lying in the position in which I had left her. I did not want to wake her; I knelt down by the bed, rested my behind on the back of my shoes, and watched her. Watching Eve while she was asleep was a pleasure I could compare to nothing else. Overnight her cheeks had gained a barely noticeable rosy glow. She was wearing the same blue-grey frock, which had been pushed up as she was turning, exposing her left thigh all the way to the hip.

I could not take my eyes off that thigh. Remembering that it would soon become part of my reward, I reached in my bag and pulled out the syringe and one of the ampoules, placing both under the lamp on the bedside table. I had decided to give her an ampoule a day, no more, assuming that that was the dose Father would have prescribed. I had no idea what the liquid was, or what Father was treating her for, but he would hardly have given her something she did not need.

I had lost all sense of time. I looked out at the pale October sunshine, at the rusty colours of autumn which filled me with unfamiliar sadness. Something was saying good-bye, something was leaving me. As I looked at Eve’s face and listened to her quiet breathing, I couldn’t escape the feeling that she, too, was saying good-bye to me, and that our time had accelerated towards autumn before it got the chance to develop into spring. Perhaps it was already too late for the dream Eve had promised me.

I continued to watch her until she produced a deep sigh, shivered slightly and opened her eyes. For some time, searching for anything that would remind her of where she was, her eyes wandered around the room until they came to rest on my face.

“Still here?” she showed surprise, not quite sure that I was real.

I told her that a whole night had passed. And in that night many unusual events had taken place: the fruits of my daring escapade are on her bedside table. Slowly, she turned her head. When she saw the ampoule and the syringe, her body shot up as if a spring had suddenly been released inside it.

“No!” she shrieked, fully awake now. “You’re a wonder! Come here, let me give you a hug.” And she stretched her arms toward me in a move that was an order as much as a request.

I nearly sank in her embrace. She smelled of stale sweat, sour but also pleasantly sweet; she had obviously not washed for days. The softness of her cheek, which she pressed against mine, was heavenly beyond description.

“You’ll be my hero,” she whispered into my ear. “You’ll supply me with medicine for my wounded soul. We’ll never leave this place. The African gods will guard us.”

Then she grabbed the syringe and the ampoule and got to work, trembling with excitement. But the fingers of her left hand had grown stiff because of the bandaged wrist, and would not obey her.

“Help me, Adam,” she held out the ampoule and the syringe, “you should know, you’re a doctor’s son.”

I was, and I did not want to let her down. I pushed the needle through the plastic seal and drew out half the liquid, putting the ampoule back on the bedside table. I reached for Eve’s arm. First she offered me the left, the bandaged one, which bore the traces of all the earlier injections. Then she pulled it back and offered me the right one.

“Let this be a new beginning. Ours.”

I found the vein and slowly pressed on the plunger until I was sure that all of the liquid had entered Eve’s bloodstream. She emitted a deep sigh, closed her eyes and leaned her head back as far as it would go. Then she let it fall forward on to her chest, shaking it, so that her matted locks loosened and bobbed up and down. She took my hand, pulled it into her lap and looked closely into my eyes.

“And now the dream. This one will be the nicest you’ve ever had. I’ve decided so.”

After that things became a little unclear, perhaps because of the feeling that the dream had started the moment Eve announced it, strengthened by the nimble gesture with which she pulled off her dress over her head. Then she did the same with the tiny slip she was wearing underneath, and finally with her panties, which gave her more trouble, because she had to wiggle out of them. But in the end she stretched out before me naked, as naked as I remembered her from my dreams, except that this time she hadn’t undressed for Father.

“What are you waiting for?” she looked at me. “In dreams we are never dressed. In dreams we are free of shame. Innocent as God made us.”

I began to undress. Not knowing what to do with my clothes, I dropped them on the floor. She kicked hers to the bottom of the bed. As I stretched out next to her, she placed her fingers round my penis and squeezed it.

“I’ll never let go of it. I’ll make it grow until it reaches the size of the one on the African god which is guarding the entrance.”

But the god was not very good at guarding, for the next moment two men walked in through the open door: Grandpa Dominic, and someone who looked like Eve’s father. Behind them, still in the corridor, I noticed the face of a policeman who failed to hide a lewd expression at the sight of our bodies. The first thing Eve’s father fixed his eyes on was the half-empty ampoule and the syringe on the bedside table. His gaze was followed by that of Grandpa Dominic, and finally of the policeman, who in the meantime had entered the room.

Then all three of them looked at me. Embarrassed, I looked at the ceiling; not because of the ampoule and the syringe, which were, after all, part of Eve’s medical treatment, but because of my exposed penis which was pointing into the air as if standing to attention. But then I remembered that this was only a dream, it wasn’t real, so I relaxed and even managed to smile at the three astonished faces.

“Eve, put your clothes on,” the man who looked like Eve’s Father ordered in a dry voice. “We’re leaving.”

I remember that later that afternoon I wrote into my dream diary how terribly Eve shrieked and cried as they dragged her out of the room and downstairs and out of the house, in front of which a police car was parked next to a black Mercedes.

“Adam!” she shouted as she looked up at the window at the end of the corridor, to which I was desperately pressing my face. Before she was pushed into the back seat of the Mercedes, I only just caught her words, the very last I would hear:

“Whenever you think of me you must smile! That’s an order!”

Because there wasn’t a moment I didn’t think of her, smiling became such a habit for me that in the end I became powerless to resist it no matter how hard I tried. Wherever I was, on my way to school, in the classroom, returning from school, in the village shop, in the basement with Abortus, at home, Eve’s image never left me. It was imprinted in the folds of my brain. Mother followed the strange twitching of my face with growing alarm. Whatever I spoke of, my face was always set at a grin and hardly ever in tune with what I was saying. One day I was telling her about the boy in my class who drowned after being pushed into a ground hole containing quicklime, but all the time there was a smile on my face. Mother spoke to Father, insisting that this was definitely a sign of brain damage.