Evald Flisar - My Father's Dreams

Pale sun was shining in through the basement window, so I didn’t have to put on the light. The sun was shining directly on Abortus, making him almost transparent. The sunlight also made his eyes appear a lot larger than they were. If he was alive, the expression in his eyes would leave me in no doubt that something terrible must have frightened him. I had no doubt that this was merely a trick of the light, so I did not worry about it; I reached behind the glass jar to pull out my two diaries, Dreams I and Dreams II. Normally my fingers found them straightaway, but now they scrabbled about in vain. It occurred to me that the last time I might have mistakenly pushed them behind one of the other jars. I checked the entire shelf, reaching behind every jar from both sides. My diaries were not there.

With a heavy heart I sank into myself. Something horrible began to course through my veins, some thick, black, oily blood which the heart refused to suck in and expel on its way through the body. All of it seemed to concentrate in my head, which was getting heavy and dizzy. It was obvious that someone had discovered my Dreams , and stolen them.

After that things became a little unclear. I remember sitting on a broken chair and pressing my hands together so hard that my fingers got blue. That must have lasted quite some time, for the beam of sunlight coming in through the window had moved from the shelves to a stack of framed pictures leaning against the opposite wall. They were paintings of anatomical details of the human body, and for what seemed like ages I stared at colour images of internal organs, stomach, liver, lungs, pancreas, gall-bladder, large intestine, but above all the heart which gave the impression that someone had torn it from the chest of a still living being and neatly sliced it in two on a chopping board.

Was it Father who stole my Dreams ? It could hardly have been anyone else; only he had access to the basement. It must have happened while I was away at the “home for those who have gone bonkers”. Now he knew everything about me, every secret thought I recorded, every detail of what I wrote about Eve and him, and their doings in my dreams, every wish of mine that Eve would do those things with me, every prayer to God to make Father impotent or castrate him; every wish for him to suffer a stroke. He knew everything I felt about him in my dreams, but nothing about what I thought of him when I was awake: that he was the best Father I could have wished for, that he could have Eve, if he wanted her, although I knew that he didn’t, for he was an older man and her doctor, and would have been happy for me to have her, although she was an addict in need of treatment.

It took a while before I realised that I was crying. Through the mist of tears I began to see things slightly blurred, so when the beam of sunlight moved on and brought into view another of Father’s bonsai plants, a large box made of five separate sheets of glass, I at first refused to believe that what I saw was really there. I wiped my tears, rubbed my eyes and looked again. Standing in the corner of the basement, amidst the disorder of old medical journals and other rubbish, was a large glass container. Squeezed into it, sitting in a stooped position, with her head pushed down between her breasts to fit the space, was a naked female body. I rose as if in a dream and slowly moved closer. The woman’s matted hair was criss-crossed with streaks of coagulated blood. Cuts on her scalp pointed to heavy blows with a sharp object.

I crouched and looked at the woman’s face from below. I felt as if a hot meteorite had penetrated my brain and set it alight. Mother’s face was still expressing the horror I remembered from the last moments of our fight at the cemetery, when she collapsed under the force of my blows and twitched before me until further blows made her body come to a rest. But that was a dream! This could mean only one thing: that I was still dreaming. That I didn’t know how to be awake anymore. That I had been imprisoned by dreams in the same way Father and I had been imprisoned inside a snake ring.

I came to a conclusion: if I smashed the front sheet of glass with my hand and suffered a cut, or even only a graze, I probably wasn’t dreaming. Without any further thought I rammed my fist against the glass which shattered with a spine-chilling noise. My fist did not stop until it bounced off Mother’s cheek. The first thing I felt in my knuckles was burning pain, then, through the pain, the limpness of Mother’s dead skin. As I withdrew the hand I saw that a tiny sliver of shattered glass had penetrated the skin in the hollow between the knuckles of my forefinger and middle finger. I pulled it out, and immediately blood began to ooze from the tiny wound.

“Mother,” I whispered. “Mother, can you hear me?”

Her face was pale and twisted into a tortuous grin. My blow had pushed her head up and back against the rear sheet of glass. Her eyelids were wide open and she seemed to be staring at me with an expression of mild astonishment; the warmest, the least censorious look I had ever seen in her eyes.

I was not particularly horrified at seeing Mother dead. I remembered Eve’s words that eternity was the only true happiness we could hope for. Nor could I feel any guilt that it was probably me who held the bone which had broken her skull. I still believed that she had no right to come between me and my desires, whether in dream or reality. Also, I felt no particular gratitude to Father for trying to cover up after me. After all, this wasn’t the first time that he had tried to protect me. It had always been clear to both of us that I could expect nothing less. Even so, I was in pain, and I didn’t know what was causing it.

I looked at the blood still oozing from the cut on my knuckles, and the thought passed my mind that if I allowed it to flow I might eventually bleed to death. This filled me with relief, the kind of relief I had never experienced before. The knowledge that, after all the horrible things which can happen in life, in the end there awaits every one of us a blissful peace in which no answers have to be sought, because there are no questions, made me feel strangely relaxed, almost comfortable. Vaguely, as if a cat had brushed past my ankles, I was touched by a longing for that blissful state.

But there was still something I had to do. I could not leave my little brother alone with our Mother’s body, which was too large to be preserved in formaldehyde and would soon start to decompose (although Father might have brought her to the basement to preserve her as soon as he managed to get a large enough jar). One way or another, I would no longer be coming to the basement, so I had to rescue Abortus and take him home to my room, where I could be with him for all time. As I carefully lifted the jar off the shelf, he swayed in the liquid as if flailing about in sudden fear. Perhaps he knew that he was about to go on a journey, the first after his birth.

I could see at once that it wasn’t going to be easy to get the jar up the chute and out into the open. Climbing out required the use of hands as well as knees. If I held the jar in front of me, I could loose my grip on the slippery surface and slide all the way back. If I landed on the chair I needed to reach the chute, the jar could easily break, and that would mean that I had killed not only my Mother but my little brother as well. I had to avoid the possibility of that happening at all costs. If only I had brought my school bag with me; then I could have placed the jar inside it, fully extended the shoulder strap, placed it round my neck and crawled out like that, with Abortus on my back.

I rummaged among the dusty clutter lying about. It wasn’t long before I found a length of rope and a large towel, which was covered in filth and mould, but that was immaterial for my purpose. I spread the towel on the ground, placed the jar with Abortus in the middle of it, joined the four corners of the towel above the jar and tied them together first with one end of the rope, then with the other. I placed the rope round my neck from behind, and so the towel became a bag in which I transported Abortus up the chute on my back.