Evidently I was failing her as much as Father. I, too, was wrapped up in my own world, which was far removed from her notions of an idyllic family life of a country doctor. Whenever I wasn’t lost in one of the books I took from Father’s library I would wander through the surrounding woods or sit in my room, daydreaming about nothing in particular and everything at the same time. Sometimes I even locked the door, pretending to study for school, while in fact I would be staring out the window, trying to imagine Father at work, examining patients, lancing boils, signing death certificates. And, above all, working on his experiments in the basement, to which he alone had the right of entry.
I loved Father very much. Without him, my growing years would have been lonely and without any mystery. I had no friends at school. Father was the axis around which revolved my joys and expectations. He seemed like a god to me, infallible. I was particularly excited by the smells that hovered about him every time he returned from the surgery: of unusual potions and disinfectants, of unknown acids and bitter-sweet ointments, even – I sometimes felt – of blood and lymphatic fluid, and the aromas of hundreds of illnesses, of which he was able, when we had guests, to talk so convincingly that most of those present instantly developed appropriate symptoms. Father laughed, comfortably at home in the midst of pain and suffering, never succumbing to as much as a cold, as if protected by the spell of a benevolent witch.
One day he invited me for a walk to the edge of the wood above our house, where he spent almost an hour of his precious time talking to me. It was spring and the meadows were overflowing with flowers. Sitting on the trunk of a fallen birch tree, we surveyed the village below us: the grey rectangular building which housed the health centre, the shop, the inn, the houses, mostly farms, the school which perched like a speck of bad conscience among the trees on the opposite slope, and our home below us, half hidden in the luxuriance of the surrounding orchard.
“Look,” Father waved his hand. “Life is beautiful. But it is beauty that causes the deepest anxiety.”
Then, using mostly learned expressions, yet visually enough, he took the trouble to explain to me step by step the mechanisms of reproduction of the human race and everything surrounding this incredible mystery. He devoted particular care to the ins-and-outs of what he chose to call coitus.
“Sooner or later,” he concluded, “the devil will start to tempt you toward the abyss. Don’t resist, only be careful not to fall all the way. It’s probably not very pleasant at the bottom.”
I said nothing. I was thirteen years old. And in any case he had not told me anything new; I had already gleaned all the relevant information, laced with photos and diagrams, from some of the books in his library. But to tell him that would have deprived him of the joy of feeling a responsible father.
Also, I didn’t want him to know how many books from his many book shelves I had devoured. Some were probably less than suitable for my age. But ever since I had learned to read, rummaging through Father’s extensive library was without a doubt the greatest joy of my life. The school had quickly become a bore and failed to provide the sort of excitement I craved. Everything was the same year after year, teachers were neither witty nor clever, and hours spent in the classroom seemed to be gliding past like in a dream. Not surprisingly – to the great sorrow of Mother – I was not the star pupil. I just couldn’t be bothered.
I was average, quiet, invisible.
2
But all that changed on the fateful day when we were asked to write a free composition entitled “What I dreamt last night”. The theme was right up my street: I had been having unusual dreams for some time, and I also remembered many of them, certainly enough to choose from. And so I chose the one I felt the teacher would find at least interesting, if not worthy of singling out for exceptional praise. I decided to record the dream as I remembered it, honestly, without frills. Allowing for a few holes in my memory (the events took place twenty years ago), my dream essay read roughly like this:
“I dreamt that my Mother was returning home from the city by train. My father and I discussed whether the way someone died was predetermined by fate, or whether it was a matter of chance. Our reasoning went like this: if the train bringing Mother home gets derailed, she will survive, but only if fate had decreed that she should not die in a train accident; otherwise she will die. But if she does die, this might also be due to chance, simply because she had found herself in the wrong place at the wrong time. So there was no way of telling. Except, suggested Father, if someone deliberately derailed the train. Then, if she remained alive, we could conclude that the time and manner of death are indeed determined by fate. If, on the other hand, she did not survive, death must be a matter of chance for the simple reason that fate would not allow her to die in a train accident if it had decided to dispose of her in a different way. But if fate wanted to kill Mother in a train accident, fate itself would cause the train to derail.
“The proposition seemed logical enough, so Father and I hurried along the track all the way to the point at which it passed a deep ravine. There, with a pickaxe, we removed a section of the rail, took shelter behind nearby trees and waited. It didn’t take long before the train’s whistle sounded just round the corner. Then it all happened much quicker than either of us had expected. One more whistle was heard, sounding almost like a cry for help. Then we heard a horrible squealing and crunching noise as the locomotive jumped the rail and tumbled into the precipice, with the carriages following and with deafening knocks and bangs piling on top of one another at the bottom of the ravine. Less than a minute later only steam could be heard escaping from the pierced boiler of the squashed locomotive. A quick survey of the scene revealed a mountainous pile of twisted metal, resembling a huge, disordered scrap-metal yard, decorated with disembowelled, dismembered or beheaded corpses, amputated limbs, shattered skulls, splattered brains, a few toddlers and even two dogs and three cats.
“Father and I hurried home to await the results of our experiment in front of TV. When the report finally came, it was worse than expected: one hundred and twenty three dead, among them Mother, no survivors. That’s how Father and I obtained proof that Mother wasn’t destined to die in a different way. But neither was she destined to die in this way, for the train was derailed deliberately by Father and me. So we succeeded in proving that fate doesn’t exist, and that everything, including death, is a matter of chance.”
I was very proud of my essay. But the teacher, who read it silently in front of the waiting class, grew increasingly red in the face, until, right at the end, he turned deathly pale. He quietly locked the hand-written sheet in his desk without saying a word. But already that same afternoon he turned up at our house and pressed the essay into Mother’s reluctant hand.
“Ask your husband to examine his head. I hope, for your sake, that he will find nothing worse than that your son is trying to make a fool of me.”
Mother was so shattered by the event, and especially by the contents of my literary endeavour, that she had to take three days off work.
“God help us,” she said when she finished reading my essay to Father, who had asked her to do so on account of his alleged inability to decipher my scrawls. “And I had such hopes! This child will amount to nothing!”
“On the contrary,” Father immediately put a different view, as was his habit. “A dreamer often turns into a genius.”
Winking at me, he added: “Right, Adam?”
I was encouraged by Father’s protection. Yet more and more I began to fall prey to an alarming feeling that I was somehow hovering above my life, rather than living it. Almost invariably I was nudged into daydreaming by something I had read. The intensity of the events that would unfold in my turbulent imagination