Читать книгу My Father's Dreams - Evald Flisar - Страница 9

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But soon I was having too many dreams, and they began to suffocate me. Daily hallucinations merged with nightmares so imperceptibly that I was finding it harder and harder to draw the line between them. Afraid that I would sink in the burgeoning swamp of my own imagination, I began to flee in the direction of hard reality, grasping at anything that could be seen, felt, heard, or smelled. Soon I became so oversensitive that I registered the slightest rustle, the tiniest change in light, the least noticeable smell.

Suspecting that I had caught one of the strange diseases Father treated at his surgery, I sought his help. I described the symptoms. He took my temperature and blood pressure. Then he listened with a stethoscope to my heart, breathing, and abdominal gurgles. Finally, with a broad smile, he slapped me on the back and said that I had obviously become a victim of the “hypertrophy of the senses”. This was not connected with any serious illness, such as a brain tumour, which might cause similar symptoms; it was simply another aspect of my growing up, and would start leaving me in due time.

But before it started to leave, it intensified. I became particularly aware of it one day in the middle of summer as I lay in the grass near the village stream. I was intoxicated by the sweetish smell of hay which was drying on the meadows. The meadows spread along the stream all the way to the hills, where fields of wheat surrounded them.

Although I lay in the grass, covering my face with both hands, I could not escape the sights and sounds of my surroundings. It was like watching a movie on the screen of my retina: not only the overflowing hay carts and rhythmic movements of the loaders, but also the glum, sweaty horses, twitching their backs because of swarming flies, the women who tried to wipe perspiration off their foreheads with the backs of their equally sweaty hands, and the men who drank warm cider from clay pots and then, in turn, strode to the nearest bushes for a leisurely pee.

I could hear the gentle rustling of alder-trees lining the stream, and a timid breeze caressed every so often my neck and the soles of my feet. A horse neighed in the distance, one of the hay carts creaked and wobbled over the uneven ground, one of the loaders was swearing and cracking his whip. Simultaneously I heard the children who were splashing about in the stream, their shrieks, and laughter, and cries. The water was not deep enough for proper swimming, but one could do many other things, such as jumping into it out of the overhanging trees, or teasing the girls if you were a boy, or the other way round.

Suddenly I became aware of someone lying nearby in the grass. It was Eve. She was looking away from me and towards the stream; or so, at least, I thought, for I was afraid of turning my head and meeting her eyes. When the clock in the church on top of the hill began to strike twelve, the bathing children started to climb out of the stream and run toward the village to their homes. It was the same every day. By the twelfth strike most were already far away, their shouts barely audible. Hot oppressive silence began to creep over the meadows; the loaders, too, had decided to take a rest. Then a body moved in the grass a short distance away. I was dumbstruck: Eve had not left!

This time I could not resist looking in her direction. She was lying in the grass on her stomach, nibbling at a fresh stalk of sorrel. Every so often she bent her legs at the knees and swung them backwards and forwards in the air. Her teeth were white, even and dense, and she had a red bikini, composed of a tiny bra and even tinier pants.

For a long time we lay there without a word. The breeze had died down and the sun began to burn with a vengeance. The stream was barely audible; the sound of the flowing water reminded me of a stuck fly persistently beating its wings. My head was getting heavier by the minute, my limbs were stiffening, and eyelids were closing against my will. Suddenly I heard her voice, bright and sonorous.

“Aren’t you hot?”

Of course I was, and could have said so, but my throat felt as if suddenly filled with jelly. All I could produce was a hesitant “aaahhhr”, hardly the sort of eloquence with which to impress a girl. Convinced that she did not understand what I meant, I gathered all my energy to explain that of course I was hot, very hot, who wouldn’t be, and wasn’t she as well? But she spoke before I opened my mouth.

“There is shade on the dam. Shall we go there?”

For a while there was silence. During this period, which seemed longer than it probably was, the church clock struck half past twelve. In the meadows behind us, the loaders had resumed work, someone was yelling at a horse. The carts were moving again. The grass around us smelled of dry soil.

“Where?” was the first stupid word I managed to utter.

I knew perfectly well where the old dam was. It was no more than twenty yards away, and hardly a dam at all, just a wall with a flat top, keeping water from the side branch on which there had once been a watermill. The branch was now dry and overgrown by thick bushes, but near the dam there were wide, three-foot walls, overhung by trees. Many a time had I rested in their pleasant shade.

“I’m going,” she said.

As she deftly rose to her feet I noticed that the grass had left shallow furrows in the skin of her thighs. (The sight of those gentle marks on her smooth, unblemished skin is what after all these years I remember most, more even than her eyes, lips, or face. I can close my eyes and see those marks as clearly as if they were before me.) As she set off with her girlish swagger toward the dam, I engaged in a brief struggle with myself as to whether to stay or follow, which I promptly lost in favour of the latter. She parted the branches before us and held them so they wouldn’t rebound in my face. She was a head taller, although she couldn’t have been much older. I was fourteen, and she – fifteen?

“Isn’t it nice here?” she asked when we reached our destination. The stiffness in my throat was slowly turning into a full-blown anxiety. I knew how cool the shade on the wall was. The top of the concrete mass, too, was delightfully cold as I stretched out on my stomach. She stretched out next to me; the wall was just wide enough for two. Our breathing seemed a little fast for the amount of energy put into our effort to negotiate the short distance.

“Now we’re hidden,” she said. “No one can see us, right?”

Suddenly, almost interrupting herself, she exclaimed, “What’s that?” And she pressed her forefinger hard at my ribs, right at the centre of my large birthmark.

“Just a wart,” I said, jerking away; she was pressing so hard that it hurt.

“Are you ticklish?”

“No!” I said firmly.

“Let me try,” she became curious, and she started to tickle the soles of my feet which swayed in the air next to her. My reaction, not unpredictable, delighted her.

“You see!” she shrieked with delight. “And what about here?”

Before I could get away she began to tickle my ribs, the most ticklish part of my body. The involuntary laughter that erupted from my throat sounded much too wild for the way I felt generally. I twisted and tried to push away the exploring fingers of her soft hands, but to no avail. As the muscles of my belly began to hurt from excessive laughter I tried to get hold of her fingers to immobilise them. But she snatched them away every time with great skill, tickling me with a delight which soon began to resemble a desire to torture.

In the end I had to resort to begging. “No more, please, no more!”

She stopped. My head was spinning. I was no longer sure where I was. But the initial distrust had been broken, I ceased to feel her presence as a threat, we sat up and looked at each other relaxed, like very close friends. I could almost feel the joy surging up from my depths, and all the feelings of stiffness had dissipated.

We lay down again, next to each other. Although I’m not a great talker even now, and was even less so at the age of fourteen, I suddenly blossomed into a real babbler. But she had much more to say even so. She talked at length about the adventures of her Grandpa Dominic, a sea captain who had retired to the village of his birth, and with whom she was spending her holidays so that he wouldn’t be alone all the time. She boasted that in the city, where she lived with her parents, more things happened in a day than in my village in a year. The village, she said, was a terrible bore.

I talked about the school, and how I felt out of place there, as if condemned to spend years among a tribe of savages, and especially about Father, my hero, who was engaged in conducting far-reaching scientific experiments in the basement. In a year or two, I said, he would allow me to join him, and eventually I, too, would become a doctor.

“Good,” she said, “then you’ll be allowed to examine me, like your father.”

I could not hide my surprise. “My Father examined you?”

She nodded.

“Where?” I asked in a broken voice.

“Here,” she said, putting her hand between her legs. She parted them slightly, so that she could cover the triangle of her bikini pants with the palm of her hand.

“Why?” I insisted hoarsely.

“Because it hurt,” she said, somewhat surprised. “You never hurt?”

“Not there.”

“Well, I do. Women are different,” she announced, as if being one already.

“And what did my Father ...” I failed to complete the question.

“My goodness,” she expressed surprise at the fact that I seemed to know so little about these things. “He rubbed ointment into it. White ointment. He pushed it deep inside and spread it all around.”

“Inside?” my voice broke again.

“Yes, with two fingers,” she extended her middle finger and fore finger. “He did a very good job. Took him more than ten minutes. Now it doesn’t hurt any more.”

Just as I was about to ask if Nurse Mary was present during the treatment, two little girls came running along the upper wall of the dam. They paused, pointing at something in the water and arguing, then carried on and disappeared.

“They were naked,” breathed Eve and fell silent.

I wasn’t shocked by the fact that the two little girls had nothing on. I was shocked by Eve’s use of the word. She seemed to have invested it with a disturbing weight. After some time she asked, and her voice, too, had become slightly hoarse:

“Would you dare to bathe naked?”

It must have been the word dare that helped my vanity to surface above the turbulence of my feelings.

“Of course,” I said, as if throwing the words away. “Wouldn’t you?”

“If no one saw me.”

“Why only then?” my courage grew.

“I don’t know,” she shrugged. “I’d be embarrassed, I suppose.”

“But you aren’t in front of my Father.”

“He’s a doctor.”

I felt that a reversal of roles had taken place and that my fear had moved into her, which made me almost burst with self-assurance.

“I wouldn’t be embarrassed,” I said. “Why should I be?”

“Because someone might see what you have.”

“Everybody’s got that. Including my father. And your grandpa.”

I could feel a slight tremor in my voice, but I did manage, half in despair, to put the decisive question. “Would you be embarrassed if someone saw what you have?”

Promptly, as if she had waited for it, she replied, “I wouldn’t mind showing it to someone who showed it to me.”

She fell silent and I could feel her body tensing up. The ball was now in my court. The anxiety, mixed with uncontrollable expectation, was almost too much to bear. My throat muscles worked as if I was about to start yodelling. But when I finally uttered the words they sounded quite normal.

“If you wouldn’t tell anybody,” I set a condition.

“Don’t be a dummy,” she said. “Of course I wouldn’t. And neither should you.”

A brief silence followed, with each of us waiting for the other to speak.

“Who’ll be first?” she breathed, and looked my straight in the eyes.

Quickly, I averted mine, swallowed an excessive amount of saliva and stared at the upper end of the wall.

“Tell you what,” she came up with an idea. “One of us lies on the back without moving, eyes closed. The other pulls off his pants and looks at the thing. Then he puts his hand on it and holds it there for, say, a minute. The other can keep his eyes closed. Shall we?”

I nodded and she agreed to be first.

She removed her bra and stretched out on her back. It was not difficult to pull off her bikini pants; she lifted and twisted her pelvis to help me. She kept her eyes closed. But mine were open wider than ever. Seeing her naked, the first naked girl I had seen lying before me, was like being hit on the head by a soft, yet powerful hammer. Her body was slim, smooth and tanned. I remembered a sentence from one of the books habitually read by Mother: “Her nipples resembled two rosebuds.” Eve’s nipples resembled more than anything two large birthmarks, very much like the one on my ribs.

I placed my hand on the “thing” between her legs. The brownish lips surrounded by a downy growth of short curly hairs felt unlike anything I had ever touched. They seemed firm and yielding at the same time. I imagined my Father’s fingers rubbing ointment deep inside her, and a lump appeared in my throat. I kept my hand there for what seemed like a minute, but was probably longer. She didn’t mind. Her cheeks were deeply flushed, her breathing unusually fast. Every now and then she would push the “thing” against my hand in a gentle rubbing motion.

“Tell you what,” I whispered. “I will lie on my back with eyes closed. You undress me and touch me in the same way.”

I stretched out on my back, closed my eyes and waited. I lifted my pelvis to help her remove my bathing shorts. I kept my eyes tightly shut, but when for a long time nothing happened I decided to look what was wrong. I was struck by a terrible fear that she didn’t like what she saw. Just then I felt her fingers gently wrapping themselves round my “thing”. This was the first time that fingers other than mine were embracing the part of me to which, in Mother’s opinion, I was devoting too much attention. The fingers felt soft and cool, maybe because my “thing” was so hot and hard. The fingers began to move up and down in the way mine always did.

Suddenly I heard her whispering into my ear, “I know a game we could play.”

“What game?” I pretended not to know what she meant.

“The game adults think is reserved for them,” she said.

“That’s not allowed,” I heard myself saying the stupidest thing that came to my mind.

“Man should be free or dead, says my grandpa. He should know, he’s been a sailor for thirty years. He’s seen things you wouldn’t think possible.”

“All right,” I said.

I had been dreaming of such a moment for so long that I could not understand my sudden hesitation and fear.

She stretched out on her back next to me and asked me to lie on top of her. When I did so, she parted her legs, and I found myself lying between them.

“Now put your thing into mine,” she whispered into my ear.

I tried, but it was more difficult than I thought, and I was unsure to what extent I had succeeded. “Is that all right?”

“Of course not, you dummy,” she berated me. “Stop poking around the entrance. Push it right in, push harder.”

I moved away to get a thrusting distance. Quietly I took a deep breath and then with a sudden motion jerked forward, only to feel horrible pain as I hit something unyielding and my “thing” bent in the middle. Eve, too, uttered a small cry of pain.

As I prepared for another try, I raised my eyes and suddenly saw, standing on the upper end of the wall, my Father, hands in pockets, watching us. I froze. Father came closer and, towering above us, looked at me with a strange glow in his eyes. Now Eve, too, became aware of his presence.

“Oh no,” she whispered.

Father pulled his right hand out of the pocket, bent forward and struck me on the face so hard that I fainted.