Evald Flisar - My Father's Dreams

Finally the snake managed to get so far that its head was about to slip over the rocky edge into the sea. But instead it turned once again to the left and began to slide toward the gap from which it was still unwinding with the rear part of its body. It was still sliding slowly, evenly, almost deliberately. Now there was no longer any doubt in our minds that it was enclosing us in a circle. This happened a few moments later, when the snake put its head on the rear part of its body and gave us what we could have sworn was a scornful look.

Everything happened so quickly that we could not quite believe the obvious implications. We should have run away as soon as the snake’s head appeared from the hole. Then again, how could we have known that the snake had secret plans? Only now could we say with certainty that this was not an ordinary snake, but an evil creature most likely determined to kill us. By exchanging glances Father and I came to the conclusion that we had no choice but to try and escape or let ourselves be killed.

Hand in hand we lifted our left and right feet respectively to make the first leap. But as we did so the snake’s head darted into the air and hissed venomously right in front of our faces. We froze. The snake’s head withdrew and again came to rest on the rear part of its body, its tiny eyes watching us. Slowly, we lowered our feet to the ground. Now we knew that the snake would kill us the moment we tried to step over its body.

A moment later the snake moved again and began to slide in the same direction as before, equally slowly, the head travelling alongside its body, with more of it coming out of the hole as though there were no end to it, until the head, having made two circles around us, came back to its resting place, from where the snake’s tiny eyes watched us no less carefully than before. After a while the snake began to make a third circle around us, this time moving visibly faster, as if wanting to strengthen its ring and finally make our escape impossible. As the ring inexorably widened, we racked our brains for a solution. The snake had encircled us twelve times, and was starting to slide around us for the thirteenth time. The ring of its body was almost two metres wide.

While we marvelled at the unusual capacity of the snake to spread all the way to the horizon, in which case, to escape, we would have to run across its body for many miles, the reptile was making a twenty-second circle. We noticed that its body was getting thinner, and it seemed that we were about to see the end of this incredibly long animal. We did, but instead of the usual tail there appeared another head! The snake had one head at the front and one at the back. One was lying to our left, and the other to our right; whichever way we decided to leap, they would both pounce on us. We had become prisoners of a devious animal whose intentions we failed to interpret correctly.

Suddenly Father spoke. “Adam,” he said, “we can’t escape this animal. This animal has escaped from us. We have to swallow it and tighten our sphincters so it won’t escape ever again.”

Although I wasn’t quite sure what he meant with his words, they seemed logical: the snake was far more dangerous in a ring around us than it would be in our stomachs, where we could satisfy its hunger by giving it a rat a day. Outside us, it had grown so large that we had become its prey instead.

“Quickly,” Father said. “You grab one head, and I’ll grab the other.”

As soon as we moved, both heads darted into the air and hissed in our faces. We grabbed the snake by its neck, one neck each, pushed its heads into our mouths and began to swallow them. We were swallowing it from both ends at once, watching the ring unwind like the rope of an anchor thrown overboard. The swallowing itself produced no sensations, the snake was merely disappearing; where to, we had no idea, because our stomachs did not swell at all.

In the end we were facing each other with about a yard of the snake’s body between us, unable to decide how to share the remainder of the animal which presumably belonged to each of us equally. Suddenly Father decided to swallow the last visible part of the snake as if it belonged to him. As our faces touched, I could feel that he did not stop, but continued swallowing as if obsessed, drawing the part of the snake I had swallowed out of my stomach, either depriving me of my share or taking the burden of playing host to the animal onto himself.

The next moment the dream gradually dissolved into another dream, in which Father and I were lying flat on our stomachs next to each other on a wide table, with our heads hanging over the edge, and with the snake in our mouths no longer thick and scaly, but thin, white and rubbery. In fact we each had a snake of our own now, and both were spouting liquid into a large metal container standing next to the table. Traces of fat and half-digested food were floating on the surface of the liquid already in the container.

Standing behind the container with a funnel in her hand was a woman who strongly resembled Nurse Mary. She was looking at us with a mixture of anger and confusion. The room also appeared familiar; it looked very much like Father’s surgery. I heard Father growl, and suddenly the rubber tube began to gag me as well, I felt like vomiting, although there was nothing left in my stomach that could be expelled. My head felt as if it weighed ten stone, I was dizzy and astonished by the sudden move from one dream to another, which was so different from the first.

The next moment the woman who looked like Nurse Mary pulled the tubes from our gullets and asked us to breathe normally.

“Nurse,” I heard Father say, “I’ll never forgive you. You have no right to make decisions about other people’s lives.”

“Really?” Nurse Mary affected surprise. “I’m so sorry. I’ve completely forgotten that only doctors can make decisions about other people’s lives. Including, no doubt, the lives of their sons.”

“Nor will I ever forgive you your stupid remark,” Father tried to raise his voice, but was overcome by weakness and lapsed into silence.

“I don’t care,” Nurse Mary said and slammed the funnel down on the medicine cabinet. “I have been brought up to believe that lives are sacred, that’s why I became a Nurse. Why you became a doctor you had better ask yourself.”

She lifted the container with the contents of our stomachs and carried it to the adjoining lavatory. “You’re lucky you were discovered by Grandpa Dominic,” she said when she came back. “Otherwise you’d now be lying on a different kind of table.”

“In that case I hope to see him on that table as soon as possible,” Father spouted in anger.

“No!” I shouted and began to vomit stomach acid.

“As for me,” Nurse Mary said, “I wish this was no more a bad dream.”

“It is,” Father said. “Only much worse than any of us expected.”

Soon after these events I slid down the chute into the basement to record the snake dream in my dairy, and to ask Abortus for his opinion. More than ever I felt that I needed advice which would not be confused or approximate, or merely benevolent, like Father’s, and which wouldn’t simply tell me what was happening, but also what I should do. In the two dreams in which we appeared together, especially the last one, Father had come too close to me; we had become too much like one person, with one pain, one longing, one sense of hopelessness. I felt, not for the first time, but more acutely than ever, that Father, too, needed someone to guide him through a maze of decisions, to tell him what was right and true. That he, too, no less than I, was lost in an emptiness in which there were no signs or pointers, and where he had to decide which direction to take as he went along. It was for that reason that I wanted to record the dream before I forgot any details: to gain, by rereading it later, some sort of understanding of what the dream might have been telling us, for I knew, since reading Jung, even from what little I understood, that dreams were messages from the hidden parts of ourselves to which no access could ever be gained.