My Father's Dreams. Evald Flisar

      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.

       4

      I am not sure to this day for how long I remained unconscious. It could have been minutes, or it could have been half an hour. But during those moments I experienced once again what I had hoped would become a rarity: a highly unusual, vivid dream. In this dream I saw my father lying on the upper end of the dam completely naked, as naked as I had ever seen him. With him was Eve, who was also naked, but that did not surprise me, since I had seen her undressed only a moment earlier. What I found most unusual were their respective positions. Father was lying on his back with both legs outstretched. Eve was crouching above him as though she had just mounted an animal for a ride. She wasn’t just crouching: supporting herself with both hands against Father’s chest, and with Father’s hands tightly clasping her hips, she rhythmically bounced up and down, with an occasional grinding movement in between.

      In my dream I had no idea why she was doing that. Her gasping and occasional moaning pointed to a degree of pain, and the expression on her face was tortuously twisted. Yet in spite of that she seemed to me more beautiful than ever, especially when she raised her face, fringed with sweat-soaked blond curls, and under tightly shut eyelids stared into the depths of herself. Usually she opened her eyes only when she lowered her head to look at Father’s face, but on one occasion she opened them with the head still raised and looked straight ahead. The eyes seemed dead, glassy, as if staring into emptiness.

      Then, suddenly, they sharpened and, startled, looked straight at me. Eve shuddered and her body stopped moving up and down. She seemed confused. But only for a few seconds, then her spasmodic movements resumed with an even greater vigour. Far from averting her gaze, she now deliberately aimed her look directly at me, as if deriving pleasure from this. At one stage she even winked at me, as if letting me know that we were partners in a conspiracy. Then I sank into darkness again, into a black abyss, which saved me from what I was witnessing.

      Out of the darkness I slowly emerged back into the world of consciousness. Rather strangely I found myself exactly where I remembered losing it: on the wall of the dam. I turned my head, expecting to see Father and Eve still there. But I was alone; the only thing moving were the shadows of the tree branches swaying above me in the summer breeze. This happened a long time ago, but I still remember the unfamiliar feeling which swept over me: the feeling of, almost, regret at no longer being able to watch Father and Eve making love (for, awake, I knew only too well what they had done in my dream). This feeling was immediately followed by deep embarrassment at having such a desire. Although the image of them was very much alive in my memory, it was surrounded by misty uncertainty, and I began to wonder whether the whole afternoon had not been a dream, from the moment I thought I became aware of Eve lying next to me in the grass. Maybe she never came to sunbathe near the stream; maybe everything was no more than one of my strange imaginings.

      But how did I find myself on the wall of the dam? And why was I naked, with my bathing shorts lying next to me? This did not seem to support my hope. As I slowly walked home, my confusion grew to the point of despair. How could I look Father in the face ever again? I knew he would soon be home; it was Saturday, when he only worked till two. As I was nearing the house I decided that it might be best to run away into the woods and stay there until both Father and Mother began to worry if I was still alive; then, surely, neither of them would dare mentioning anything that might drive me away again. But it was too late: just as I decided to slip past the hedge and run across the fields towards the safety of the nearest beech-trees, I heard the wheels of Father’s car on the gravel driveway in front of the house.

      “Adam, wait,” he shouted.

      I ran as fast as I could, but his hands grabbed me from behind just as I reached the edge of the wood. Gasping for breath, we collapsed on the grassy fringe, already in the shade of the nearest trees.

      “Adam,” Father wheezed and panted above me, “Adam, I’m sorry.”

      After calming down a bit more, he added, “I’m sorry I hit you.”

      With his apology, my hope that the whole thing had been a dream was blown away. Suddenly I was filled with dread that all the rest might have been true as well. It was with immense relief that I heard Father say, “What did you dream?”

      “People don’t dream when they’re unconscious,” I put my final doubt to the test, “they only dream when they’re asleep.”

      But Father insisted that I had not been fully unconscious, I had merely slipped into some kind of intermediate state, resembling the phase of sleep during which dreams are most vivid. He employed a medical term in support of his theory, REM, rapid eye movement. While we dream, our eyeballs roll around under the eyelids, and that was what he had seen as he bent over me to revive me. Seeing that I was dreaming, he decided not to wake me. It is essential, for the sake of mental well-being, that dreams are not interrupted, especially not if they are in any way unpleasant or shocking. Unpleasant dreams