The Dream Room

shoes and usually we stayed inside at break times, hanging around in the corridors or eating our sandwiches at the grubby Formica tables in the cafeteria. The older students congregated in the bathrooms and smoked secretly in the stalls, which meant we had to hold it in until they’d had their last cigarettes and gone back to their classrooms. One boy in my class complained, but after he had had his arm twisted behind his back and his head held under the tap, we waited patiently in line until the seniors left.

In the afternoons I’d walk back home through the tail end of a shower, trying to avoid the ankle-deep puddles that had been lying there for days and seemed as if they would never go away. It rained so hard and so long that the water in the canals rose above the stone embankment and soaked the grass. In some places, the stones had been washed away and it looked as if some gigantic water beast had taken bites out of the quayside. The trees were black with water, the streets were flooded, and one time it hailed so heavily that people on the street, their faces contorted in pain, ran for shelter in doorways and shops.

They were rains from distant lands. Sometimes I’d be walking home after school and the air would be filled with scents from across the sea, from other continents. One day it would smell of orange peel, another day, of asphalt, pebbles, cedar, sea, mountains, sheep, or barefooted young girls. Sometimes there was a thunderstorm and I’d wait, with several other pedestrians, in a doorway until it had stopped thundering and lightning. After that the city always smelled like freshly washed linen.

Our house wasn’t holding up too well. The doll doctor had already come around three times to check the roof and one night in the middle of a downpour he and my father crawled through the attic window to clear dead leaves out of the drainpipe and check the lead. Pale brown snails’ trails ran down the wall of my bedroom and in the stairwell was a stain that looked like a map of Russia.

My father suffered as much from the incessant showers as our house did. Now and then, when we were building planes, the room so dark that we had to turn on all the lights, he would stand up and go to the window. As my mother and I glued and filed, he’d look outside, hands in his pockets, shaking his head, his shoulders hunched as if, even here inside, he could feel the damp and the chill. He was strangely silent. Sometimes he’d stare, without even seeing it, at a half-painted plane on the table before him, and for minutes at a time he’d do nothing.

One afternoon I came home from school and when I got to the top of the stairs I saw, through the window that separated the hallway from the kitchen, my parents, at the breakfast bar: my father was standing in the kitchen, my mother sat on the other side of the bar, on a stool. My mother was talking, my father wasn’t looking at her. He was leaning over the bar, shuffling through a stack of paper. “…model airplanes,” I heard my mother say. “Boris, look at me! You can’t go on avoiding everything. This isn’t making you happy, either.” He looked up and grinned. “Happiness,” he said, as if he had just heard a good joke for the first time in years.

I opened the door and went inside. Neither of them appeared to see me. It was completely silent. Then, after what seemed like a long, long time, my father turned his head toward me. He swept together the sheets of paper and said: “Back to work.” My mother’s eyes rested on him briefly, as if she were waiting for an answer, and then she got up from her stool.

That evening, but it was probably nighttime by then, I woke up to the sound of their voices. They weren’t speaking particularly loudly, they weren’t having a fight, nor was there anything in the tone of their voices that disturbed me, but all the same, I woke up. Although I couldn’t understand every word they said, I knew that the conversation was a continuation of the one I had interrupted that afternoon. I listened for a while to the murmur of their voices and then fell back to sleep.

The next morning, when I was standing in the bathroom brushing my teeth, my mother walked in. She turned on the shower and held her hand out to check the temperature. I rinsed my mouth, dried myself off, and asked what we would do when there were no more boxes. Behind her, steam was billowing up out of the shower stall. She stepped into the mist, tipped back her head, and closed her eyes.

“Is he going to fly again?”

She straightened her head. Her face was patterned with glistening rivulets. She brushed the water out of her eyes and gave me a penetrating look. “Fly?” she said. “No, I don’t think so. Why do you ask?”

I turned to the mirror and looked at the patches of steam that made everything seem hazy and far away.

“Everything comes to an end,” said my mother.

I drew my fingers through the film on the glass.

My mother, her voice barely audible over the splattering of the water, began humming.

That night I heard their voices again, but I was so sleepy I couldn’t understand what they were saying.

THE NEXT DAY I came home from school, and my father was sitting alone at the table. The familiar display of finished and half-finished planes was gone. He sat up straight, in his usual chair, smiling absently into space. For a long time he didn’t even seem to notice me. It wasn’t until I had made tea and poured us each a cup that he snapped out of his trance. He held his head to one