My Father's Dreams. Evald Flisar
“So,” he returned to what seemed to bother him, “what did you dream?”
I stared at my feet and said nothing. How could I possibly describe the dream I had on the wall of the dam without dying of embarrassment?
“Listen, Adam,” he said. “You know I have never hit you before. But this time I had a good reason. Do you realise that?”
Again I said nothing, I merely shrugged.
“I have nothing against your desire to follow your natural drives. This is perfectly normal at your age, and I approve of your efforts to lose virginity. The problem is Eve. She may be a year older than you, but she is still underage. What would her grandfather say, to whom her parents entrusted her in good faith that she would be safe with him? And that’s not all. She is my patient. As her doctor I am responsible for her. Can you imagine what would happen if people learned that the doctor’s underage son was having sex with his father’s underage patient? You would be sent to a correction school. I would end up in jail.”
Silence was all I could offer in reply to that.
“Are you telling me you don’t care?”
I shook my head and mumbled something.
“Speak up, so I can hear you,” Father said.
I looked up and said clearly and loudly that I did care. But I still didn’t dare look him in the eyes. Now even less than before, for now I wouldn’t be embarrassed only because I dreamed what I could never tell him, but because he caught me doing things which I would have preferred to do without his seeing it.
“Eve is of course very charming and quite mature for her years,” Father said. “But not the sort of girl you should hang out with. She’s got a serious problem. I should know, I’m treating her. Even more important: you shouldn’t talk about this to Mother. We don’t want her to suffer a stroke, do we? There’re things men have to keep to themselves. Do we understand each other?”
I said nothing, I merely shrugged. I felt that my dream could much more easily be confided to my dream diary than either to Father or Mother. Suddenly I felt a great need to write it down, and so lessen its burden. I decided not to show my diary to anybody. And I knew where I was going to hide it so that no one would find it.
After some hesitation, Father put his arm round my shoulders and gently drew me toward him. “Still writing your diary?”
I looked at my feet again and shook my head. I said I had thrown the yellow notebook into the well in the school’s courtyard on the last day of school. I no longer dreamed as often as I used to, so I had nothing to write about. In any case my dreams had become very vague and fragmented, I hardly remembered any of them. There seemed to be no point in recording senseless jumble, I said.
“Actually,” Father said, “it wasn’t a bad idea to get rid of that diary. If you dream anything unusual, anything that bothers you, you can always tell me, and we’ll talk about it. Not as doctor and patient, but as father and son.”
I nodded.
“Shall we go home then?” Father said and got to his feet, visibly relieved.
I could never clearly remember the days that followed. From the very start they were suffused with a strange, surreal mist in which, with the passing of time, things and events became less and less discernible, let alone definable. Very often I felt that I wasn’t seeing things with my eyes, but rather feeling them with some inner tentacles. Although I recorded every detail in my dream diary, it was difficult to tell from these notes whether I was talking about dreams, hallucinations or real events. Only I knew, or thought I knew, that I was describing dreams, and only I knew that dreams were about Father and Eve. In fact, after the event on the wall of the dam I hardly dreamed about anything else. If I did, it was always at night, and forgotten so fast that any diary entry would not exceed a couple of lines.
Dreams about Father and Eve usually took possession of me in the afternoon or early evening, always without any indication that they were about to start, as if I had been sucked into sleep by an invisible power which pushed me over the edge of a precipice into an abyss; it was like suddenly fainting. Occasionally I dreamed standing up, but my presence in the dream was always that of an observer. So I could not really say that I dreamed about Father and Eve. I dreamed about us, myself included, with the only difference that they weren’t aware of my presence, whereas I registered every movement, gesture, step, look or sigh of theirs, every expression on their faces.
That was largely due to the fact that my “hypertrophy of the senses” had somehow extended its power from the waking state into my dreams. I could smell the dusty straw in the barns in which I stealthily watched them –as though the straw were real and I were really there. I could hear the straw’s crackling and rustling as Father and Eve, engaged in a strange wrestling match, intertwined like mortal enemies, rolled about, emitting spine-tingling moans. I could feel the evening dew on the grass, and hear the racket of crickets in the harvested fields, and the subdued barking of dogs at the houses they passed on their way to a hiding place.
In my dreams they were getting together wherever and whenever they could, in the nearby wood, in the meadows lining the stream, even, late in the evening, in the orchard behind our house, where they ran the risk of being discovered by Mother. Although in the dreams I sometimes wished that this would happen, it never did; they were only dreams, after all, and I had no control over the way they unfolded.
Regardless of where they met, their coupling ritual always followed certain rules. First Eve would look around to find the most suitable spot, then she would pull off her panties and throw them away, then she would lie down on her back and pull her skirt up to her navel. My Father would kneel down before her and spend a few moments watching her. She would bend her legs at the knees and sway with either one or the other this way or that. Then, still on his knees, Father would move closer, wrapping her legs round his waist. Then they would start. I could never tell how long they remained together. Sometimes it seemed like a very long time, and often, spying on them from behind the bushes, I would get bored. But I could not simply get up and leave; in a dream I had no will of my own.
In one of the dreams they met at their usual place in the wood, took off their clothes and pranced about naked among the trees. Father had to catch her, tie her hands with his trouser belt, then tie her with his necktie to the nearest tree; only then was he allowed to push against her from behind and start with his thrusting movements. To see each other naked, and to be able to play hide-and-seek among the trees like two little children, seemed to provide them with greater pleasure and more excitement than the actual coupling. But not me. I still felt the greatest thrill when Father slid into her and she uttered a shuddering sigh or even a subdued cry; then my heart took off as if trying to beat its way out of my chest. This lasted until Eve’s features drew into a distorted expression of pain and she dug her nails into Father’s back.
But all this was only the stuff of my curiously repetitive dreams, which I faithfully recorded in my secret diary. The dreams were so frequent and my descriptions so elaborate that I soon filled the notebook and had to buy a new one, a red one this time, which I gave the title Dreams II. I never asked myself why I was making all those detailed notes, considering that I could never ever show them to anyone, certainly not to Father and least of all Mother. Nor did I read them myself, except every now and then to add a detail or two, for some things, strangely, I could only remember later.
Quite often I found that recording the dreams gave me more pleasure than the actual dream itself. Why it was so, and why the dreams had become such an obsession, and why occasionally I caught myself wishing they would become even more frequent, I could not tell. From time to time I fell pray to the haunting thought that Mother’s fears were coming true and that I was indeed slipping dangerously toward the edge of madness. As for Eve, after the event on the dam I did not dare approach her any more; I wouldn’t know what to say to her.
5
There was only one person I could confide my dreams to, and that person lived in the basement of the health centre where Father conducted his secret experiments.