The Dream RoomMarcel Möring
For Sam
Contents
One
WHEN, IN A SUDDEN SURGE OF PRIDE, HE GAVE UP…
Two
AND SO WE STARTED BUILDING MODEL AIRPLANES. Despite the fine…
Three
EVEN THOUGH IT DIDN’T STOP RAINING, MY MOTHER and I…
Four
SOMETIMES A CHILD—ELBOWS ON THE WORKBENCH, chin cupped in his…
Other Books by Marcel Möring
Copyright
One
WHEN, IN A SUDDEN SURGE OF PRIDE, HE GAVE UP his old job without actually having a new one, my father decided to build model airplanes. The Doll Hospital, which was just downstairs, was constantly visited by boys who came for a plastic Messerschmidt kit or Spitfire Mark V, but as soon as they saw the ready-made models that were hanging from the ceiling most of them wanted one of those instead. I had been there when a couple of boys once asked if they could buy one of those finished models.
“They’re not for sale,” said the doll doctor. “They’re here to show what it looks like. It’s a kit. You’re supposed to build them yourself.”
He began talking louder when he spoke to these boys, like an English tourist in France who thinks that it’s only a matter of speaking more slowly and loudly to make yourself understood.
“But I don’t want to build them myself,” the boys replied.
“What do you think?” roared the doll doctor. “You think I’ve got nothing better to do than spend the whole day building airplanes for you? Bugger off!”
He was a man of little patience.
Once a month, when he came up to collect the rent, the doll doctor would complain to my father. They’d sit in the old wicker chairs on the balcony that ran all along the back of the house, and drink beer. It was always evening when the doll doctor came.
“In my day we did everything ourselves. My father even made me my first bicycle, out of the parts from three old bikes. Nowadays those brats can’t do a damn thing.”
“Everything was better in the old days,” said my father.
“God…How right you are.” The doll doctor drank his beer and let out a deep moan.
“If you sold them ready-made,” I said, “you could ask more money for them.” I was leaning against the railing, looking out at the windows on the other side of the park behind our house. Sometimes, when my father and I were sitting on the balcony, we played a game: we tried to guess what they were doing and saying, in their little lamplit cubicles across the park. Usually it ended in some sort of radio play. “I told you not to dry your socks in the oven!” I’d shriek, and my father would slowly reply that drying socks in the oven was a better idea than making ice in a hot-water bottle (which I had tried once).
“I don’t have time to build airplanes,” said the doll doctor. “And I don’t feel like it, either.”
“I would let somebody else do it,” I said, “and I’d give him a few guilders per box and add that to the price of the kit, plus a bit extra. Nobody sells ready-made model planes. I think the customer is perfectly happy to pay more for something like that.”
“And who is supposed to build them for me?” asked the doll doctor. He sounded pensive.
I turned around. My father shook his head with a barely perceptible “no.” The doll doctor followed my gaze.
“Boris! Damn! You’re an aviator. If you…I’ll give you a guilder a box.”
My father sank back in his chair, groaning. I picked up my empty glass from the table and went inside.
“Why a guilder?” I heard my father say. “And what does my being a pilot have to do with it?”
“You can have fifty cents if you think a guilder is overpaid,” said the doll doctor.
“If you want another beer…?”
“Okay, one guilder fifty,” said the doll doctor. “That’s as high as I go. I have my margin to think of.”
My father picked up the empty bottles and headed for the kitchen. “His margin,” he said, as he passed me. I was sitting on a stool behind the bar, reading a cookbook. “He who will get rich because of him will never be poor again.”
“I heard that!”
“You were supposed to,” said my father. He ducked into the steaming mouth of the refrigerator. When he reappeared, he looked at me for a long time. I pushed my glass toward him. He straightened his back and walked past me. “I’m not talking to you, sir,” he said. “You tricked me into this.” The doll doctor laughed. I picked up my glass and went to the fridge. “That’s the last one,” said my father. “In my day, a boy of your age would have been in bed hours ago.”
“Everything was better in the old days,” drawled the doll doctor.
“Now he’s telling me,” said my father.
WHEN I CAME HOME from school the next day, the landing was packed with boxes with pictures of airplanes that rose up, grinning wickedly, out of grayish clouds of smoke, fire belching from their wings. The piles of cardboard were nearly up to my chin and formed a colorful wall of cardboard that ran from one end of the hallway to the other. On one of the piles stood a glass globe filled with water in which a tiny airplane was perched on a stand. There was a note from the doll doctor taped to the glass. My name was written on it. I took the globe in my hand. It began, hesitantly, to snow.
“For a man who sells children’s toys, he really doesn’t have a clue when to stop,” said my father, when, half an hour later, he walked out onto the landing and found me there, amid the drifting piles of boxes. I still had my coat on and was sitting on the floor, the snow globe in my hand, dreaming about Hawker Hurricanes, Lancaster Bombers, and Focke Wulfs. “The boxes alone are good enough for you, aren’t they?” He kneeled down beside me and
