That night, sleeping in her robe, she dreamed of Hugo. She had fallen asleep, thinking of Hansi inside of her, on top of her, loud and possessive and sure of himself. So why would she dream of Hugo? She dreamed of Hugo sitting at the kitchen table in their old house, already very old, perhaps already with lung cancer. His glasses pinching red spots on the sides of his nose, his thick gray hair standing up in tufts on his head from where he’d run his fingers through it again and again. He was looking through contact sheets in the dream, as he so often did in real life. Everything in the dream was like a normal day from their past, except where was she? She was there watching him, but she couldn’t see herself. Hugo looked up from the table and took off his glasses and closed his eyes and rubbed his temples. When he opened his eyes, they were red and glowing, like a wolf’s. He said, “Meine Augen tun weh. Can you see them bleeding? They are shedding tears of blood.”
But they weren’t shedding tears, not tears of blood. They were red and glowing painfully at her—full of terror, full of bodily anguish. And then in the dream, his eyes turned into Hansi’s eyes, and the redness was that of the devil himself, and Eva was alarmed in the dream and started to back out of the house. She couldn’t see herself doing it, but she could feel her body moving, backing up. “Nein, nein,” she said, but now she was awake, her head pushing into the pillow.
Chapter 9
She was not happy with her dream. How could she have such a dream, after her Hansi came back to her? Was it guilt? Hugo was not even alive, and she still felt guilty sleeping with another man. A man she’d been sleeping with for ten years. Hugo was her husband before God, and she was sinning. Could that be the message of the dream? Yet they had not been faithful to each other even in marriage. The dream felt like a supernatural punishment, and now awake, she was mad that she was so afraid after such a nice night with her lover. Why couldn’t God let her have her happiness?
She had been raised Catholic. Sometimes, even after marrying a Jew and living an atheist life in a godless country, she still felt more Catholic than anything else. But it was her kind of Catholicism. Angels and devils communed around her, and occasionally, late at night she heard them. They were God’s creatures, all of them, the spirits and the living, as was every living breathing organism on the planet Earth.
Hugo would tease her, when they were first married. Tease her about her prayers and her rosary and her talk of the saints. Saint Jude. Saint Michael. Saint Anthony. She had loved these saints as if they were her brothers growing up in Austria—her keepers. Indeed, she prayed to them to return their father from the war—he had been a prisoner of war for a year, in France—and her father was returned. When her stepmother kicked her out of the house—her house, with her sister and brother still in it, the house she had run so well since her mother’s illness, since her mother’s death—she had prayed to them again, to give her a man, to find her a husband. And they had; they gave her Hugo. So although she knew that Hugo was the man she should marry, and although she knew she should live her life in a Communist country, where all people were equal, where no man ruled over another, she did not find it easy to give up her God, her Christ, nor her saints.
Hugo would say, “When we die, we rot in the ground and our physical body returns to the earth, the earth from where we came. The liquid inside of us is salt water, our tears, our urine. Do you know why? Because once, we lived in the ocean. And now we carry it inside of us. No God created us, as we are now, walking the earth. We climbed out of the ocean, like other beasts, and evolved into what we are now, slowly, over millions and millions of years.”
And perhaps it was all true. That they came from the ocean. But God may have overseen the whole process. And millions of years to us may be a second of time to Him. And while Eva had seen pictures of the flesh that rots in the earth, she knew a spirit life existed, too. What else could it be, this consciousness that was uniquely hers, but a spirit? A spirit that would someday meet with a greater spirit, with that from where she came, from where they all came?
And perhaps Hugo, the man who believed in nothing but molecules, perhaps Hugo’s spirit was trying to tell her something. That he was some sort of Devil now—but no, then it was Hansi’s eyes. That he was still more interested in his photographs than anything else? That he was suffering
