could almost hear the sound of air being drawn into Mother’s lungs. I saw her putting my notebook on the sideboard and rising to her feet. Afraid that she might hit me, I turned to run out of the house – and bumped into Father who had just returned from work.
“Father,” I pointed an accusing finger at Mother, “she’s read my dream diary.”
“Here,” she quickly reclaimed the initiative by passing him the notebook, “read for yourself the distortions of your son’s mind, and don’t reproach me for it, because you brought him up. Whatever I said, you always called feeble-minded.”
She pushed him aside so she could pass into the hall, where she clumsily stepped into her tennis shoes and walked out of the house, slamming the door. As Father and I looked out the window we saw her crossing the courtyard to her bicycle, which was leaning against the door of the garage. She mounted it and furiously pedalled off down the gravel driveway to the road.
“You have no right to read his diary!” Father shouted after her, although she was already too far away to hear him. “Are you a doctor? How many times do I have to tell you that you’re not! Apart from that, the boy’s at an age when privacy is essential to him!”
Before nightfall Mother quietly returned, as always when she stormed off in anger. Father had used her absence to read, and then carefully read once more, the account of my “rooster dream”, frowning here and there, but also emitting a few spontaneous chuckles. After dinner, which Mother prepared in silence, and which we ate in silence, Father cleared his throat and passed his opinion.
He said that this particular dream of mine, like all the others, was a consequence of my premature reading of books which my virgin intellect was unable even to comprehend, let alone absorb their contents in any meaningful way. So the contents had nowhere to go except sink into my subconscious mind, from where they erupted into my dreams in the form of surreal images. At the same time, he continued, my dreams were a classical symptom of sexual awakening. The metaphoric content of my last dream left no doubt about that: I wanted to peck my way out of the shell, which was my childhood, because it had become too small for me. I wanted to grow a crest with which I could command the allegiance of hens, in other words of the female sex, which the rooster, or man, must fecundate according to a biological programme in his genes. The number of eggs in my dream showed very clearly that my urge had reached a critical stage, and that I could lessen the built-up tension only by more frequent and vigorous masturbation.
What followed was the worst quarrel I had ever witnessed between Father and Mother. Insults were flying about like shrapnel on a battlefield. Soon they completely forgot about me, so I slipped out, ran to my room and locked myself in. But even there I couldn’t escape the sound of their bellowing voices. I could muffle them slightly, but not completely, by pulling the duvet over my head. Eventually the quarrel ended, like so many before, with Father unleashing the full fury of Wagner on Mother’s ears.
I prayed to God to let me stay in my next dream forever.
3
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