After the torn shirt, it was his leg’s turn, and his head’s and shoulder’s, anything, I wanted to hit him… But all I did was kick him, not all that hard, no, definitely not hard enough to make him scream and call out for Jaglika; then I pulled him by his hair and when I truly was about to hit him (no, I did want to kill him: in my hand was a heavy, sharp object, one without a blade), he turned around so contorted, and twisted (scoliosis?), pulled away, and ran off to Jaglika – in the direction of her omnipotent lap – as if she could help him!
Anyway, Jaglika couldn’t see how the dreams meant anything to her, dreams were just omens, indicators of the events of future days; at night she dreamt and in the daytime it came true, at least a little bit, at least in part – and that was sufficient – that was enough for her; all the rest was frightful stupidity that only silly people messed with: Danilo and I. Poor Jaglika wasn’t going to get it even after she was dead; she was never going to get this dream thing. Even if a hundred of her Hymenopterae started work on convincing her, whispering into her bulbous ears – covered in little curly grey locks of her already faded hair, even if I do say so, one hundred souls of her ancestors would gather and like one terribly complicated tribe – forgetting the quarrels and discord that belong to time – for they are hymenopterous timeless beings (Jaglika did not allow an insect of any kind to be killed in her room, in fact, not even a flying one) and started enthusiastically to persuade her to put dreams aside – someplace where there’s room for them so that she does not touch them, or interpret them, so that she doesn’t conceive of them by any means (not for anything in the world) as theirs or anyone else’s and especially not divine messages; Jaglika would make fun of them, dismiss us with a wave of her hand, laugh at them again, rub her right eye and her left eye (the lid) and again, my God, again she’d laugh at them … and then it could happen that she would say: ‘I know more about dreams than all of you over there from that gang that gets together and dreams about everything and does nothing else, and afterwards you hold court and talk and then go and dream some more and on and on, again and again… I know more, more about dreams.’
‘Jaglika, when you’re dreaming, do you know it’s a dream; do you know while you’re asleep that you are dreaming?’ – I asked her, very much anticipating that she would betray some secret to me, or something very much like a secret. But Jaglika gave me a look like the Devil himself (her power over me was the certainty of an animal, the neighbour’s dog, let’s say, when it is squatting to piss – the way Jaglika does, by the way – the dog is a female, and for me, as for all wretches, there’s nothing left to do but amass and harbour hatred towards dogs and Jaglika) and she said, ‘Oh, you miserable girl, and I thought you were smarter than that.’
If I didn’t know that I was dreaming when I’m dreaming, I could with total presence of mind state that dreams were definite, in the way that reality is; that they are a parallel world and how it’s in point of fact my personal dichotomy (in the back, by the occipital bone); I could even rejoice at the lack of necessity of subsequent connection, of the subordination of dreams to reality or of reality to dreams, which is actually what Jaglika and the whole world do, or the whole world and Jaglika: what harmony! The whole difficulty, however, lies in the fact that, when I dream, that’s when I have some half-retarded control that constantly warns me that I’m dreaming, I’m only dreaming, and then, thank God, all the knives, the awls, the daggers with their sundry grips and all their various blades sticking in my neck and my fingers and face, and more often in strangers’ faces and in everybody’s backs and everyone’s eyes – they look like plastic children’s toys, bendable and soft and harmless; but they aren’t, they are not that at all; and at any rate I have no control like that (no distance from my own self) when I’m not dreaming; and so, thanks to the terrible disproportionality between sleep and so-called wakefulness (or whatever other names that marvel goes by) and a little indirect mediation here and a little direct intervention there, I am in a double trap, and that worries Jaglika, my mother Madame Marina, and Marina’s husband: they would all say, flat out and one after the other, and rightly so, with complete rectitude and perfect indifference: ‘It’s all your own fault,’ like that time twenty-five years ago or more when for the first time I ruined a pair of newly purchased shoes (Marina maintained that I’d deliberately spent the entire morning standing in a puddle: ‘This is all your fault. You’re not getting any new ones.’ I wore wet shoes that whole semester – I absolutely could not get them to dry out. But no – I wore an old pair, all ripped up.
And Danilo? Danilo takes my dreams, he lies and he steals, and he stays silent about his own dreams, not a word, not a syllable, but nothing and utterly nothing; only occasionally, when he is with Jaglika, does he whisper something. Danilo is my informer; he rats my dreams out to me, and rats me out to Jaglika. Could it be that Danilo simply has no dreams? He does not even sleepwalk, although that’s a most ordinary, trivial thing; but consequently he peers through the lock into my room while I’m sleeping (he’s been awake for several years running) and he steals what I’m dreaming about, and later he tells it to Jaglika, but only to her, fortunately.
A Picture from Childhood
Marina took Danilo and me to Tivoli one time! She arranged my left hand across Danilo’s right, squeezed our fingers (safety snaps), and then she checked the buttons on our identical coats, turned up our collars – she thought (at the time) that the wind was blowing but in fact it wasn’t (I know it wasn’t); she ran her hand quickly, impatiently, across our heads (the backs of two identical heads) and, as always, both Danilo and I felt the electricity popping from her palm. I thought (at the time) that faces were distorted and became half-shy or half-perverted grins – creditable grins, like masks at New Year’s – all because of this little current from Marina’s palm; but it wasn’t like that, it wasn’t that; Marina knows that it wasn’t because of that. Then she told us: ‘Go walk around a bit!’ For the first few moments, while she was still right behind our backs (like a policeman on the beat – the parent’s burden) and our identical itsy-bitsy smoothed-down heads, we walked along (three or four or five steps) like we were glued together – so we’d make the right impression on Marina, and then we both set off running without letting go of each other’s hands and we soon fell down. Danilo hurt his chin and scraped both of his arms (his coat tore), and it was probably the exact same for me. Okay, maybe it wasn’t his arms or shoulders, but his knees, it’s quite likely that it was his knees, but I can’t rule out that the scrapes and scratches were everywhere – on all the hard parts of his body. From that point on, the weird things started happening: whenever Marina would take us to the park, the woods, or for a ride on the merry-
go-round, Danilo and I, although our hands were not hooked together, walked pressed up against one another and when we’d start to run, always, the same thing always happened, the same strange thing: it was as if we tripped each other up but no one else saw it, no one else could see it, and we would crash into each other. Then Marina, practical and wise (indifferent), when we had in the course of just one spring ruined all our trousers and jumpers, decided to keep us far apart from each other; at first, when she took us to the park or the woods or anywhere like that, she put herself in the middle, in between us (my God, it was meters of distance… let’s say, without exaggerating, it was two full meters), with me on the left side and Danilo on her right. When we came back it was vice-versa, Danilo on her left side and me on the right. In the lift it was one of us in front (underneath, with your head below her large maternal bosom) and the other in back, with your head at the level of her waist. Indeed, in the lift there was truly no chance (or only a negligible one) for activity that would result in torn clothing, but Marina, being practical and enterprising (those two things go together) and, a third thing, too – efficient, careful (those are one and the same) – considered precautionary measures everywhere at any time and in any place (great or small) to be indispensable, even though it might strike a person (a figure) on the outside as silly and superfluous.
IV
Jaglika has stopped walking; of course I didn’t doubt that Satan himself had knocked nails into her from her hips down; in all truth. I was forced to call up Marina, our household god, who always knows