I do have one picture. But I don’t remember if you’re in it. I’ll show you later. What is it of? I mentioned that dream. I did, I really did. You were surprised I have nothing better to think about. It was when I was still living abroad. I rarely dreamed. Still don’t, as it happens. When I was playing, I’d often get home in the middle of the night, I’d be so exhausted I wouldn’t have the strength to dream. And even if I did dream something, when I woke up in the morning I’d never remember it. Then one night I had a dream, and it was like my dream was being projected on a screen. I don’t really remember, but I think it may still have been going on when I suddenly jerked upright and sat on the edge of the bed. I admit I wasn’t sleeping alone, and she woke up too. She was concerned, she asked me what was wrong.
“I had a dream,” I said.
“Tell me about it,” she said.
But what was I supposed to tell her when I wasn’t even sure whether I was dreaming I was sitting on the edge of the bed, and the dream was my waking life, or vice versa.
“You weren’t in it, in any case,” I said to reassure her. “Go back to sleep, it’s the middle of the night.”
“Were there other women?”
“Yes.”
“You men always dream of other women.” She fell asleep again right away.
I stayed on the edge of the bed, wrestling with my thoughts, trying to figure out if it had been my dream. And wondering if I could believe it was someone else’s.
It was autumn, like now, I was walking through meadows, wearing a hat. You won’t believe it, but it was the brown felt hat I’d left on the train. So many years had gone by since then, I could have sworn I’d forgotten all about it. No, quite the opposite, after that I always wore hats. My whole life I’ve worn hats. I couldn’t imagine wearing anything else on my head. I even had a kind of respect for hats. Someone wearing a hat usually aroused my curiosity, in any case more so than with any other kind of headwear. Not to mention women. The women I best remember are the ones who wore hats. Myself, I always felt best in a hat. It was like I was someone else, someone beyond myself, someone for whom everything else fell into the background. Not that I was proud that way. Not at all. I was afraid to live. I felt like I’d only just emerged from a shell, and I still found everything painful. For a long time I was afraid to live. You’ll find this hard to believe, but wearing a hat actually helped a lot. I began looking people in the eye, and not accepting things at face value. When I wore a hat, memory would somehow torment me less.
And another thing, I liked to greet people with my hat. That was a true pleasure for me. The fact is, there’s no fuller way of greeting a person than by tipping your hat. And you can’t imagine how I enjoyed it when a gust of wind would try and lift the hat off my head. I’d experience almost a sense of oneness with it as I held it by the brim. More, it felt like I was staying in place by holding on to the hat, often with both hands. Even if it was a howling gale, I knew I couldn’t let it snatch my hat away.
Yes, I’ve had lots of hats through the course of my life, in all sorts of different colors, styles, various kinds and makes. I never scrimped on buying hats. Or regretted the time it took. I could spend hours in shops and department stores, trying things on till I finally found the right one. But I never wore any of them very long. I didn’t just change them when the fashion changed. And I never threw any away. Life had taught me that everything comes full circle, the way the Earth does. Fashion’s no different. What was unfashionable would later become the in thing.
That’s true. But I never cared whether the fashion was for hats or for other kinds of headwear. Besides, it’s never been the case that hats are completely out of fashion. Even these days you see women and men in hats. Hats may be the only thing left that testifies to stability in the world. Wouldn’t you say so? Think how many things have disappeared and how many new ones have come along, but hats have stuck around.
My whole apartment was littered with hats. There was no more room for them in the closet. They lay on the bookshelves, on the books themselves, on the chest of drawers, on the windowsills, everywhere. I had this antique cast iron coat stand in the hallway which had spreading hooks like antlers at the top, ending in brass knobs. It was festooned with hats.
Yes, I made good money. Not right away, of course. Generally speaking dance bands pay well. Depending on the establishment, naturally. As you know, not that many people like classical music, but everyone dances. And I’ll tell you something else, dancing isn’t just dancing like you might expect. It’s only in the dance that you can truly see who’s who. Not in conversation, in dance. Not at a dinner table. Not on the street. Not even at war. In dance. If I hadn’t played dance music I wouldn’t have gotten to understand people so well.
I often wore a hat when I played in one band or another. For a saxophonist it’s the right thing. There’s even a certain style to it. The rest of the band would be bare-headed, I was the only one in a hat. Though sometimes the entire band wore hats. I forget which band it was, but we had a poster with all of us wearing hats. So it was at that time I had the dream about the brown felt hat that I’d only had on my head in the store when I tried it on. How can you explain that? No, it was definitely the brown felt one, it slipped down over my ears the same way.
From far off you could tell it was too big. Because as I was walking along it was like at the same time I was watching myself walking, from some undefined point. That happens in dreams. Though not only there. It was visibly rocking on my head with every step I took across the uneven meadows. When you’re watching yourself like that, and you’re also aware of it, you see it even more vividly than you feel it on your head. I was wearing an overcoat like yours. Underneath I had on a suit, and I think a necktie, though I don’t remember the color or pattern. Besides, it was hidden under a scarf that also looked like yours. Whereas my shoes were tied together by the shoelaces and slung over my shoulder, and I was barefoot. Why barefoot? That’s what I can’t explain. I was doing well for myself, after all. My pant legs were rolled up past my ankles, but that didn’t seem to be enough, when I looked down I saw my pants were wet from the dew all the way up to the knees. The grass was tall, it hadn’t been mown in a long while. Also, there was a mist so dense that I would see myself then vanish again, I even lost the sense of whether it was me crossing the meadows, passing through the mist. It was only the hat that showed me it couldn’t be anyone else. Especially since I could feel a biting cold on my bare feet, as if the grass was just thawing after a night frost.
I was walking rather briskly, though I wasn’t in a hurry to get anywhere. The mist kept blurring the image, the painful awareness that it was me was still beyond me. If such a feeling is even possible. I seemed more like a hint of myself, as I watched from that unidentified point and saw myself moving through the mist, across the meadow. It was only the hat that was visible to me, perhaps because it was the brown felt one and it was too big. I had the moist cold taste of the mist in my mouth, I felt I was permeated with it.
At a certain moment I paused, wiped the mist off my forehead with my handkerchief, then I leaned down to roll my pant legs further up, and that exact second the hat fell off my head. I started looking for it in the grass and at that point I might have woken up, because without my hat I felt like I had one foot in the waking world. That would have been best for me, I wouldn’t have had to keep on walking through the mist, across the meadows, I wouldn’t have had to remember the dream after I woke up. It was just a dream, just meadows, just mist, they weren’t worth bringing into my waking life.