My Father's Dreams. Evald Flisar

almost daily, and always about him and Eve? How would I describe the details? Not only Mother, he, too, would begin to suspect that I was gradually losing my mind. And then, being a doctor, he would feel obliged to treat me. He would drive the vein-throbbing dreams from my head, and I would be left with nothing.

      I had become so suffused with my dream world that, without it, I would feel as if I had been robbed of half of my life. I still dreamed about other things as well, but not half as exciting. The unexciting, confusing, nightmarish dreams I normally had at night, mostly before I woke up in the morning. Erotic dreams, by contrast, would come on without warning at any time, mostly in daytime. The manner in which they sucked me in was sometimes abrupt, very much like an ambush, while at other times they would slowly, and almost imperceptibly, merge with my endless daydreaming. Maybe it was all due to the summer heat, in which I never felt fully awake but seemed to float through the days as if wrapped in a swarm of images. Would I be able to, if I suddenly came upon Father and Eve, tell with certainty whether I was seeing them in a dream, imagination or reality? Very soon I began to doubt that.

      I knew that sooner or later this would be put to the test. When, late one afternoon, sitting near the edge of the wood above our house, I tried to imagine Father and Eve sneaking through the brambles into the shade under the oak trees, I was not particularly surprised when I felt a pair of soft hands being placed over my eyes from behind; I knew they were Eve’s before I even touched them. This was confirmed by her teasing laughter. The only thing that surprised me when she removed her hands was that I couldn’t see Father. She was alone. In my dreams they were always together.

      “Pinch me,” I begged her. “Come on, pinch me, I want to see if it hurts.”

      First she pinched my left cheek, then the right one; after the first pinch I still wasn’t sure, but the second one hurt beyond any doubt.

      “You’re real,” I said, suddenly feeling a wave of fear. A huge lump formed in my throat. I couldn’t say another word. Crouching in front me, she was so close that her sun-tanned legs, misty blue eyes, slightly parted pink lips, and especially arms carelessly thrown over her knees filled me with the pain of such uncommon longing that I had to avert my eyes. She was looking at me with the expression of someone who had just caught a strange animal, nothing dangerous, just a little rabbit she managed to trap, and which she could let go immediately or after she had some fun listening to the pounding of its heart.

      “Are you afraid?” she asked.

      I shook my head. Suddenly regaining the power of speech, I said, “I thought you weren’t real.”

      “Who is, anyway?” she composed her features into an expression of profound importance. These could hardly have been her words. I vaguely remembered Father once saying something similar: who can claim to be real in a world which, as proved by the physicists, is composed mostly of emptiness? Did they talk about such matters in my dreams? Or in the surgery? She was after all, as Father had said, a patient of his. My confusion grew.

      “It’s so hot,” she said. “Why don’t we go down to the stream? Have a splash and cool off. Lie in the shade on that wall.”

      “No,” I pounced as if stung by a bee. Not on that wall, I wanted to say, but what I said was, “Not today.”

      She stood up and sighed as if at a loss what to do.

      “Then why don’t you come home with me, to meet Grandpa Dominic?”

      This sounded more attractive and far less dangerous. But still I couldn’t make up my mind. Without another word she moved off. Treading softly with her bare feet, she floated towards the nearest trees. As soon as she reached the shade, she turned and with a curved forefinger beckoned me to follow. She was wearing a short blue skirt which barely covered her thighs, the same one she had in my dream about the events in Father’s surgery. But the T-shirt was different, white and suffused with the sweet smell of her sweat, with long sleeves which only just covered her elbows. Her shoulders were broader than her hips. If it wasn’t for her softly rounded thighs and gently undulating breasts, her body would have looked more like a boy’s than a girl’s.

      “Come,” she grew impatient, “you’ll see grandpa’s statues from Africa.”

      She walked on and soon vanished among the trees. I jumped to my feet and followed her along the path which twisted its way under the intertwined branches of alder-trees towards the part of the wood dominated by extremely tall fir and pine trees. There the sun rays shone through the gaps in the congestion of needles, and danced on the mossy ground in the rhythm of the breeze which was inducing the branches above to stir in an exciting, disorderly fashion. The rays danced caressingly around Eve’s hurrying feet which led us deeper and deeper into the wood, to the grassy path where I had already been in my dreams, and which led across a flowery meadow to the foot-bridge which took us across a dry stream-bed to the dusty road which led up an incline to Grandpa Dominic’s house.

      Along the way Eve picked up a stick, part of a rotting branch. As we walked on, she swung it in the air, twisted it in a circling motion above her head, thumped the ground with it, made thrusting motions as if preparing to throw a lance, and used it for checking the path before her while pretending to be blind. Once or twice she scratched her back with it, and three times she placed it on her shoulder as if carrying a heavy club. Twice she leaned on it as she waited for me to catch up. But I always slowed down when I saw her waiting, while she, reassured that I followed, turned to walk on.

      As I watched her swagger and hop before me, her image began to merge with the scenes from my dreams, and suddenly I saw Father, too, walking alongside her in front of me, although I knew that he wasn’t there. As though they belonged together. As though she on her own, and especially alone with me, represented a burden I felt too weak to carry and wanted to get rid of it before it grew heavier.