secret. I was too young to know what I know now. What I did feel was that Father’s obsession was for him the only way to counterbalance the ugliness of disease and death he had to face daily in his surgery.
6
Like the basement, Father’s surgery, too, was not inaccessible to a boy of my ingenuity. The health centre was situated in an old building in which cracks and gaps were appearing all over the place. One such gap I had discovered by accident a year or so earlier when I climbed the fire-escape stairs at the side of the building and squeezed through a wooden hatch into the loft. Between the wall of the chimney and the wooden ceiling I found a gap wide enough to offer me a good view of the surgery below. Since then I had spent many an hour observing Father at work, sometimes even missing school, for I preferred to get acquainted with biology and anatomy in a more direct way.
The gap was a little too small to offer me the view of the entire room, but the examining table was right below, next to the wall of the chimney. A little further on, close to the door, I could see part of another table, which belonged to Nurse Mary. It was covered by an incredible jumble of medical files and pills and ointments in various types of packaging, all mixed together in an appalling way. Sometimes Nurse Mary had to sift through the disarray for ten minutes before she managed to locate the file for the patient already stretched out on the examining table, while Father accompanied her frantic search with his usual cynical remarks, tired of having to repeat them day after day.
As a doctor my Father was never at a loss for words. In fact he talked incessantly, while Nurse Mary, being the quiet type, contributed little more than an occasional “yes, doctor” or “no, doctor”, which, when they were alone in the room, became “yes” or “no”. To his patients, regardless of their age, sex or rank, Father talked in the tone of someone who was aware of his position of power, and determined to exploit it to the full. Humorously berating those who disregarded his advice seemed to be one of the greatest pleasures of his life. But he could also be patient and kind, and would spend minutes explaining to a hard-of-hearing old lady how often and in what manner to take the pills he prescribed. Sometimes he would do that three times in a row. It was at moments like those that I realised how good my father really was, and how his oddities were no more than harmless traits of someone who, because of his extraordinary abilities, could not possibly behave like an ordinary mortal.
Peering through the gap in the ceiling, I managed to witness so many unusual things that eventually there was nothing much left that could shock me. I would see examinations during which Father would peer inside female sexual organs through a long tube; I would see broken limbs, hips, and jaws; I would see dermatitis and gangrene and the birth of children, where my Father was always eager to assist, although Nurse Mary was also a qualified midwife. I would see children with mumps, chicken-pox and boils on their behinds; I would see people fainting after a single injection, followed by revival attempts that sometimes lasted an hour. I would see wounds from which blood was gushing in spurts. I would see nails in skulls and slit throats, and mad people who at the top of their voice shouted words no one could understand. And children, battered almost to death by their parents.
Inevitably there came the moment when things began to repeat themselves, and when the odour of blood and decay started to turn me off. Sometimes, peering through the gap in the ceiling, I would doze off, especially during summer, when the air in the loft grew unbearably hot. Or I would suddenly start feeling dizzy, believing that I was actually dreaming what I thought I saw in the surgery. When I began to have frequent and very visual dreams about Father and Eve, and the line between the inner and outer worlds started to fade, this went a step further and very often it seemed to me that even my presence in the loft was no more than a dream.
I knew it was only a matter of time before Father and Eve appeared in my dream in the surgery. Little did I know that this would happen only three days after I entrusted my dream diary to Abortus. Nurse Mary walked out into the waiting room to usher in the next patient, but returned to tell Father, “Eve is here.”
Father winced and shot an angry look at the door. “I told her to come at two,” he said, glancing at his wrist watch. “Ask her to wait another ten minutes.”
As Nurse Mary obligingly turned to carry out Father’s instructions, Eve walked into the surgery. In fact, I remember it to this day; she floated rather than walked into the room, deeply tanned from the sun, wearing leather sandals, a very short skirt and a T-shirt which barely covered her navel. Her blond curls looked unwashed and uncombed.
“We agreed you’d come at two,” Father tried to sound stern, pretending to be the kind of doctor he wasn’t.
“It is almost two,” Eve replied. “I can’t wait any more.”
Nurse Mary moved to her desk and gave herself something to do with prescriptions and files. Father rose and took a few steps round the surgery.
“You’re not registered here,” he said. “I’m doing a favour to your grandpa. You’re supposed to come when I’ve finished with my regular patients.”
He stopped in front of Eve. Although I wasn’t quite sure, it seemed to me that he made a meaningful nod in the direction of Nurse Mary.
“I can’t wait any more,” Eve said in a soft, half enticing, half pleading voice.
After some hesitation Father said, “Nurse, please tell Burger to wait a little. Go to the dispensary and mix that ointment for him, you know the one I mean, for the warts. The one I promised him last time.”
Nurse Mary put down the file she seemed to be studying for no particular reason and in a rather stiff-backed manner replied, “That’ll take time, doctor, that ointment has ten ingredients.”
“Well, then,” Father said, “all the more reason not to waste any more time, wouldn’t you say?” And he looked at her, every inch a man of authority.
Nurse Mary, poised for further objections, melted like a piece of lard in the sun. As soon as she closed the door behind her, Father turned to Eve. “Didn’t we say – ”
“Give it to me,” she interrupted him, “or I’ll start screaming!”
Father said nothing; he just kept looking at her. Then he walked to the door and turned the key in the lock. Putting his right arm round Eve’s waist he lifted her, light as a feather, onto the examining table. A satisfied laughter burbled from her mouth. As she swung her legs backwards and forwards, one of her sandals slipped off and fell on the floor. For some moments Father disappeared from my area of vision. While he wasn’t there I kept looking at Eve’s brown legs and deeply tanned shoulders.
When Father reappeared he was holding a syringe with a long needle. I expected Eve to wince and draw back, but she willingly extended her arm, letting her head fall back a little, with eyes closed and the lines of her face composed into an expectation of pleasure. With a movement perfected by years of practice, Father pushed the needle into her vein and slowly pressed on the plunger to push all of the clear liquid into Eve’s circulation system. Eve uttered a sigh of relief. Father threw the used syringe into the rubbish bin and held his head in his hands.
“This shouldn’t be happening,” he said, more to himself than to her. “I’m a good man. Why am I doing this?”
Eve slid off the examining table and ended up on her knees. She unbuttoned Father’s fly, reached inside and pulled out Father’s penis, which she put in her mouth and started to suck. This was the first time I saw anything like it; it had never even occurred to me that things like that could be done. I felt a pleasant wave of hope sweeping over me; the beauty of the world awaiting me had gained another dimension. What I also felt very strongly was that none of this was really happening; it was merely a dream to be recorded in my diary and read out to Abortus, so that he, too, would feel excited about being alive.
Just then Father looked up and twisted his face into an expression of strange discomfort. He seemed to be looking straight at the gap in the ceiling, and through it at me. “Help me,” he breathed. “You, who are above me, help me, please.”
7
There