Evald Flisar - My Father's Dreams

I was sitting in the bathtub, rubbing the tips of my fingers with a hard brush. Although the suspicious traces had been rubbed off, I kept brushing the fingers, afraid that they might reappear. My filthy pyjamas were lying on the floor of the bathroom; they were the first thing Father noticed as he entered.

“How are you, Adam?” he asked. He looked very grave; he seemed to have aged by at least twenty years.

“I’m taking a bath,” I said, “but I probably won’t go to school, I don’t feel well.”

Father sat down on the edge of the bathtub and looked at me. In his eyes I noticed something I had not seen before, a shadow of great sadness, perhaps disappointment; in any case something that hurt me deeply. As if Father was no longer on my side, as if I had done something that had forever set us apart.

“Mother’s gone to work?” I asked.

Father said nothing; he just kept looking at me.

“No,” he said after a while, as if waking from a deep thought. “That’s what I came to tell you. She had to leave very early, Aunt Yolanda has fallen ill. They phoned late last night.”

“When is she coming back?”

After a brief silence he said, “Probably not so soon. Yolanda is her only sister, as you know. She’ll probably want to take care of her until she improves. Or dies.”

He joined his hands and placed them limply on his knees as if not quite knowing what to do with them. “Remember our common dream?”

I nodded.

He looked at me for a while as if trying to find the right words. Then he said, “I think we should repeat it. I don’t mean that particular dream, I mean that we should once again enter a dream together, hand in hand, two souls making a single journey, do you know what I mean?”

I didn’t, but I nodded anyway.

He got up, took a towel from a hook on the door and handed it to me with a sense of urgency. “Dry yourself, put some clothes on and come down.”

When I entered the living room I found him sitting in the armchair in front of the TV, staring at the blank screen. He didn’t notice I had come in.

“Father,” I said quietly.

It was only after I called him for the second time that he emerged from his thoughts. He got up immediately and asked me to come to the sofa. He removed a few cushions and pointed to where I should sit. Then he sank his weight into the sofa next to me.

“Adam,” he said. “We’re going to swallow a dream potion. Then we shall enter a dream in which, with a bit of luck, we shall learn a few important truths. Or sink into darkness from which we shall not rise again. Are you brave enough for this great adventure? Which could well be our last?”

I nodded.

“Are you sure?”

I nodded again. I had nowhere to go, I had nothing to do, and I had no idea what to do with myself. Following Father into a dream, whatever dream, was the only direction left.

“All right, then,” he said. “Let’s be off.”

He reached for the two glasses which were standing on the coffee table and gave one to me, raising the other one to his lips.

“Let’s not waste any time,” he said. “Ready?”

I nodded.

“One, two, three,” he said.

We emptied our glasses with a few gulps. The clear liquid had a bitter-sweet taste, with a touch of something acid, metallic.

We were standing on the sea shore and looking toward the horizon. There were no waves. The surface of the sea was smooth and straight, like an endless sheet of grey glass. If we were to roll a marble across it, it would travel unhindered until it bumped against the line of the horizon, where it might bounce off it and travel all the way back. It is normal to see little sailing and other boats off the shore, leaving frothy trails in their wake. But this time there were none. And usually there are other signs of life, such as a dolphin suddenly jumping out of the water and splashing back in. Now there was nothing; dolphins had either left the area or were too frightened to come to the surface.

With good reason, for something was decidedly wrong with the surface of the sea. Father was of the same opinion; I could see that on his face. The sky was clear, the sun was high, but the rays were not reflected by the smooth surface, which was dull and dead, as if the sun was not shining on it at all. But the rocks behind us were shimmering in the sun. It was very hot, with sweat pouring down our faces. I could feel the heavenly fire burrowing into the back of my neck and spreading throughout my body.

I listened carefully for any signs of a breeze that might cool us, but the air was completely still, there wasn’t a sound to be heard, most unusual for a summer afternoon on the sea shore. Usually there are waves crashing against the rocks, or, if not, the pine trees sway and rustle in a gentle sea breeze. At the very least you can hear the joyful screams of bathers or music from their transistors radios. This time we could hear nothing at all. The air did not stir, nothing moved.

Then we heard, or thought we heard, something that was definitely close to a sound. Perhaps not quite a sound, more a feeling that something was creeping along. This was the first and only movement we became aware of, but even here we had no idea where it was coming from. All we knew without any doubt was that somewhere close by something was sneakily crawling along. Then we suddenly froze. Peeping out of a hole in the rocks was the head of a snake. It was quite large, of bluish colour, with brown stripes on its back. I couldn’t tell whether its eyes were staring at me or at Father. Father thought they were staring at both of us. We did not move. The snake’s head bobbed up and down and the reptile began to crawl out of the gap. Its body was thick, smooth and shiny.

Father and I were surprised rather than frightened by the sudden appearance of the strange animal. After all, the snake represented the first sign of life, so our surprise was accompanied by what could almost be called a sense of relief. But this did not last very long, it was suppressed by the obvious fact that it was a snake that was moving, rather than something less dangerous, for example bird, a fish or lizard.

Our visitor, in the meantime, had put its head on the ground and was sliding over the smooth surface of the rock. The snake’s body followed its head, emerging through the hole as if unwinding out some underground cave. As the head slowly approached we began to wonder about the snake’s intentions. That it was a venomous snake we did not doubt for a moment. It was sliding past approximately a yard from our feet. We briefly hoped that it was sliding to the rocks behind us in order to lie in the sun. Perhaps it wasn’t even aware of us. I kept turning my head to follow its progress. So did Father. The snake moved very slowly, as if sliding along required exceptional effort. It must have been incredibly long, for its tail had still not appeared from the hole.

Suddenly the snake turned its head to the left, with its body following in an arc. It occurred to me that she might want to slide around us to reach a flat rocky elevation a little to the left of us, where it would curl up and lie in the sun. I kept turning my head to the left to follow its progress until the snake had crawled so far that my neck began to ache. Then I turned my head in the opposite direction, and soon the snake’s head came into view from the right. Father, too, turned his head. The snake had given the flat elevation a miss and was increasingly moving in what looked like a circle. It was sliding back toward the shore, maybe towards some other hole or into the sea. This in itself was not unusual. What couldn’t have been coincidence was the obvious and disturbing fact that the snake’s distance from our feet was exactly the same all around. The tail had still not appeared from the hole.