The Dream Room

hard to decipher, but it wasn’t long before she figured out that it was a souvenir of the mayor’s visit to a Belgian city. The rest was more of the same: a shield commemorating the fifth anniversary of a friendly alliance between her father’s village and that of a French mayor, whom she suddenly remembered as the “Uncle Gaston” who had had the annoying habit of grabbing her hands and rubbing them along his badly shaven cheeks; an embroidered standard made by the local chapter of the Christian Housewives’ Association on the occasion of the Queen’s silver wedding anniversary; the dusty, moth-eaten head of a wild boar that, according to the inscription on a small metal plaque, had been shot on October 3, 1929, in the Black Forest. She pushed the crate out of the way and shone her flashlight over the dark walls. The attic extended over the length and breadth of the house and was divided into a large central area, where the stairs emerged, and four tiny rooms, on the left and right, that had once been the servants’ quarters. As a child she had always wanted to play up here, but her mother, probably because she herself didn’t dare go upstairs, wouldn’t allow it.

When she returned downstairs that afternoon she was carrying a burlap bag over her shoulder that was so heavy she had to stop and rest halfway down the stairs. Back in the room of her patient, who had fallen into a deep sleep and whose face had an unpleasantly waxen serenity about it, she began distributing her loot over the walls. The two items still hanging there—a funereal painting of the moors and a calendar that had last been torn off in February 1937, with a faded illustration of a small Romanesque chapel in the north of the country—she laid on the top shelf of a closet. Even though she had to hammer in a nail here and there, the sick man didn’t wake up.

At the end of the day, when my father finally opened his eyes, the sun was shining so low that he seemed to float in soft orange light. His eyes fell on a group of men in straw hats with striped bands, clutching an enormous oar. In the background the shady water of a tree-lined rowing course sparkled, little flags hung from the trees and boats lay keel-side-down in the grass. He had seen a boating race once, in England, and now his thoughts turned back to that afternoon. The scent of freshly mown grass rose in his nostrils, he could smell the dark water. Ice tinkled in glasses and a woman’s high laughter drifted up to the treetops. Then he dropped off to sleep again.

As it turned out, it wasn’t the journey that had caused my father’s relapse, nor any other type of exertion, but an infection in an old wound. A course of penicillin, for which my mother jabbed a sturdy needle in his buttock twice a day, soon had him back on his feet, although my mother, with the same obstinacy with which she had once christened him Boris, would always insist that it was the paintings and photographs that had cured him.

The same painting that still hung in the sunny room that she now referred to as the dream room. I turned around and looked out at the sea, the light above the water, which cast a dirty green haze over the waves.

“It’s going to start pouring any minute,” I said.

My mother came and stood next to me. “Maybe it’ll be raining too hard to go outside.”

My face clouded over.

“But who cares! Quick, get your windbreaker. Put on your boots. We’re off!”

We ran out of the room, grabbed our jackets from the coat rack, and shot out the door before anyone could say anything sensible. We ran down the brick path to the gap in the dunes that opened onto the beach and felt the rising breeze. When we reached the foot of the dunes the wind came rushing toward us like an old friend. We backed away, grabbing each other by the sleeve. The tide was still going out. The wet strip of sand along the water was a cluttered trail of driftwood, seaweed, and dead fish. The sky was dark gray with a sickly purplish hue. We walked about a quarter of an hour along the tidemark, kicking at the flotsam and jetsam with the toes of our boots, and then turned back. As we reached the bunker, the clouds burst and the rain came down in such thick drops that we had to stop walking, because we suddenly couldn’t see a thing. Then we ran into the dune, slipped through the hole in the bunker, and sat there, crouched, our backs against the damp concrete.

The rain fell the way it had been falling for weeks: as if melting glass was streaming from the heavens. My mother rummaged around in the pocket of her jacket and took out her cigarettes. The narrow entrance to the bunker began to smell spicily of Luckies. I followed a shred of smoke as it drifted outside and disappeared in the pouring rain. In the distance, barely visible in the roaring flood of rain, someone was walking. He came down the brick path, half stooped, shoulders hunched. He was wearing a long coat that he held closed at the neck with his right hand. Not far from the bunker, he came to a halt. Shielding his eyes with his hand, he looked first left, then right. The entrance to the bunker was dark and the rain made it even harder to see. His eyes skimmed over the dunes, the bunker, the gap between the dunes, the sea. Then he pulled his collar tighter around him and walked onto the beach.

Next to me, my mother threw the rest of her cigarette in the sand and slowly got to her feet. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s give it a try.”