The Dream Room

question of his going back there for at least the next six months. He walked on crutches, could barely take care of himself, and was in no shape to fly. A week before my father left the hospital, my mother, to the great surprise of the hospital staff, resigned, saying that she herself would care for him, in her parents’ house in the dunes. And so the patient was driven to the village and helped up the stairs to the guest room. My father, who could offer no resistance against my mother’s overwhelming decisiveness, spent the rest of his convalescence in that spacious, sunny room with the view of the dunes and the wide blue sky above the sea. He was not the first flier to recuperate there. The pilot whom my mother had seen hanging from his parachute in a tree years before had stayed in this same room and he had had the same nurse: the mayor’s headstrong daughter.

Hardly a year after my father’s spectacular admission to the hospital and my mother’s equally spectacular response, they were to be found standing before the village mayor, who had the honor of joining his own daughter in holy matrimony.

The swelling under her wedding dress was, even to a practiced onlooker, imperceptible, but the bride’s condition became apparent when, that night at the reception, she ran from the table (the appetizer was consommé julienne, something that would turn her stomach for the remaining seven months of her pregnancy) and, upon her return, began desperately eating pickles. By the time my mother finally looked up the party had completely fallen silent. She swallowed a last bit of pickle, dabbed at her mouth with the napkin, and smiled at her mother, her father, and, then somewhat uncertainly, at her new spouse. My father looked at her, leaned over, and kissed her on the mouth. Then he turned to the company and said, in such a gentle tone of voice that it was almost as if he were forgiving the guests for their awkward silence: “We shall call him David.”

Until long after my birth, no one understood how my father could have been so sure that I would be a boy and how he had managed, that night, to silence the entire wedding party with such a simple remark. A sigh of relief went over the table. My grandfather, the mayor, stood up, raised his glass, and, glowing with pride and wine, drank a toast to his first grandson, while being tugged on the sleeve by his wife, who would never completely forgive her daughter for allowing herself to be impregnated under her own roof by a man who made his (undoubtedly meager) living flying spray planes.

A month before my birth, my father was well enough to fly again. But the thought of the child that was about to arrive and the memory of those waving insect legs against the barn, just as he was about to smash to bits against a cow, prevented him from taking up his old job again. Instead, he applied for a job as a salesman for a compressor manufacturer, while studying mechanical engineering in the evening. Eventually he became a kind of inventor who would work for a while for one firm, devise a machine that would render him superfluous, and then go looking for the next firm where he could bring about his own dismissal. My mother had given up her job as a nurse after my birth, but started working again when the peculiarities of my father’s career became apparent. And now she, too, had proved incapable of holding a job. My idea, assembling model airplanes to supplement the family income, had indeed become a plan. It was the plan that would save us.

Two

AND SO WE STARTED BUILDING MODEL AIRPLANES. Despite the fine weather—it was a warm spring and the evenings were long and balmy—we sat from early morning till late at night working away on Hawker Hurricanes, Spitfires, Mosquitoes, B-17s, and Lancaster Bombers. All over the house were model planes in various stages of completion. My father had strung a wire from one end of the room to the other, from which we hung the models when they were finished. The bar was covered with freshly painted planes and the table strewn with fuselages and wings, wheels and elevators. When I came home from school my parents had already done half a day’s worth. Usually we’d have a cup of tea on the balcony and I’d tell them about what had happened at school that day, and then we’d sit down at the table and get to work. We each had our own place in the assembly line. I unpacked the boxes, took out the larger pieces, and glued them together while my mother assembled the smaller parts and my father filed and painted the finished planes and added the insignia. We lived in a bubble where everything was quiet and sheltered and friendly; the pot of tea steamed over on its little candle, the sounds from the park behind our house drifted in through the wide open balcony doors. Once I bent down to pick up a wheel and saw that my mother had crossed her leg over my father’s. His hand lay high up on her thigh. Her shoe lay on the floor and she was stroking his calf with her stockinged foot.

I remember that time with the same keen vividness as my father recalled his days as a spray plane pilot.

A week or two after we had started building, the weather turned and the rains began that were to last all summer long. Most mornings when we woke up, we heard the rain pelting down on the windowpanes and often it wouldn’t let up until late in the afternoon. It never really got cold, but I still wore a jacket to school, hood up, Wellington boots on my feet. In the corridors, outside the classrooms, it stank of wet clothes and damp