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 were moments when I wished I could discuss my dreams with Father. At least he should be able to tell me at what point they began and how long they lasted before dissolving back into ordinary wakefulness. But how could I admit to him that I had lied about throwing my diary in the well? How could I possibly tell him that I was having these dreams almost daily, and always about him and Eve? How would I describe the details? Not only Mother, he, too, would begin to suspect that I was gradually losing my mind. And then, being a doctor, he would feel obliged to treat me. He would drive the vein-throbbing dreams from my head, and I would be left with nothing.
I had become so suffused with my dream world that, without it, I would feel as if I had been robbed of half of my life. I still dreamed about other things as well, but not half as exciting. The unexciting, confusing, nightmarish dreams I normally had at night, mostly before I woke up in the morning. Erotic dreams, by contrast, would come on without warning at any time, mostly in daytime. The manner in which they sucked me in was sometimes abrupt, very much like an ambush, while at other times they would slowly, and almost imperceptibly, merge with my endless daydreaming. Maybe it was all due to the summer heat, in which I never felt fully awake but seemed to float through the days as if wrapped in a swarm of images. Would I be able to, if I suddenly came upon Father and Eve, tell with certainty whether I was seeing them in a dream, imagination or reality? Very soon I began to doubt that.
I knew that sooner or later this would be put to the test. When, late one afternoon, sitting near the edge of the wood above our house, I tried to imagine Father and Eve sneaking through the brambles into the shade under the oak trees, I was not particularly surprised when I felt a pair of soft hands being placed over my eyes from behind; I knew they were Eve’s before I even touched them. This was confirmed by her teasing laughter. The only thing that surprised me when she removed her hands was that I couldn’t see Father. She was alone. In my dreams they were always together.
“Pinch me,” I begged her. “Come on, pinch me, I want to see if it hurts.”
First she pinched my left cheek, then the right one; after the first pinch I still wasn’t sure, but the second one hurt beyond any doubt.
“You’re real,” I said, suddenly feeling a wave of fear. A huge lump formed in my throat. I couldn’t say another word. Crouching in front me, she was so close that her sun-tanned legs, misty blue eyes, slightly parted pink lips, and especially arms carelessly thrown over her knees filled me with the pain of such uncommon longing that I had to avert my eyes. She was looking at me with the expression of someone who had just caught a strange animal, nothing dangerous, just a little rabbit she managed to trap, and which she could let go immediately or after she had some fun listening to the pounding of its heart.
“Are you afraid?” she asked.
I shook my head. Suddenly regaining the power of speech, I said, “I thought you weren’t real.”
“Who is, anyway?” she composed her features into an expression of profound importance. These could hardly have been her words. I vaguely remembered Father once saying something similar: who can claim to be real in a world which, as proved by the physicists, is composed mostly of emptiness? Did they talk about such matters in my dreams? Or in the surgery? She was after all, as Father had said, a patient of his. My confusion grew.
“It’s so hot,” she said. “Why don’t we go down to the stream? Have a splash and cool off. Lie in the shade on that wall.”
“No,” I pounced as if stung by a bee. Not on that wall, I wanted to say, but what I said was, “Not today.”
She stood up and sighed as if at a loss what to do.
“Then why don’t you come home with me, to meet Grandpa Dominic?”
This sounded more attractive and far less dangerous. But still I couldn’t make up my mind. Without another word she moved off. Treading softly with her bare feet, she floated towards the nearest trees. As soon as she reached the shade, she turned and with a curved forefinger beckoned me to follow. She was wearing a short blue skirt which barely covered her thighs, the same one she had in my dream about the events in Father’s surgery. But the T-shirt was different, white and suffused with the sweet smell of her sweat, with long sleeves which only just covered her elbows. Her shoulders were broader than her hips. If it wasn’t for her softly rounded thighs and gently undulating breasts, her body would have looked more like a boy’s than a girl’s.
“Come,” she grew impatient, “you’ll see grandpa’s statues from Africa.”
She walked on and soon vanished among the trees. I jumped to my feet and followed her along the path which twisted its way under the intertwined branches of alder-trees towards the part of the wood dominated by extremely tall fir and pine trees. There the sun rays shone through the gaps in the congestion of needles, and danced on the mossy ground in the rhythm of the breeze which was inducing the branches above to stir in an exciting, disorderly fashion. The rays danced caressingly around Eve’s hurrying feet which led us deeper and deeper into the wood, to the grassy path where I had already been in my dreams, and which led across a flowery meadow to the foot-bridge which took us across a dry stream-bed to the dusty road which led up an incline to Grandpa Dominic’s house.