The Dream Room

The rest of this unsuccessful crash landing passed him by. He heard the story later from the farmer’s wife, who came with her husband to visit him in the hospital.

She hadn’t realized that the pilot was no longer trying to entertain her and the children until the plane flew low over the fence and landed. Shortly afterward the cow went hurtling through the air, the plane spun around on its left wing, which was now dangling helplessly, seemed to make a pirouette and crashed with its left side against the ground. When the farmer’s wife got to the wreck, the right wing was sticking up. The left half of the plane had carved a deep track through the grassy field. The pilot looked like a rag doll, pressed against the back wall of the cockpit, his face caked with dirt.

In the weeks after the operation, my father looked like half a mummy. His left leg was in a cast up to his pelvis, as was his left arm. His chest was bandaged, the left side of his face was swollen and blue. The right side of his body was strangely unhurt. Anyone who happened to walk into his room saw what, to all intents and purposes, was a healthy man. But if they walked past the bed and looked back, they were surprised by the sight of a mummy swathed in plaster and bandages.

And so they met: the pilot who fell from the sky and the nurse who fell to the floor. Although she didn’t actually work in the ward where my father lay, my mother could be found there whenever she was off duty. The head nurse, who caught her reading Anna Karenina to the patient during visiting hours, reported her curious behaviour to the matron, but my mother said that the patient never had visitors, didn’t seem to have any family, and that she didn’t see the harm in keeping him company in her own free time. No one could think of anything to say against this. It wasn’t until months later, when the two of them were found in the hospital garden, he in a wheelchair, she on the bench next to him, kissing with impassioned clumsiness, that it became clear to everyone that my mother was no Florence Nightingale and he, no Icarus. By that time, however, it was too late for moral indignation. He was soon to be discharged from the hospital and that raised a completely new problem.

Before the accident, my father had rented two rooms from an old woman in a village, not far from the airstrip from which he and his friends took off to go spraying. There was no 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 honour of joining his own daughter in holy matrimony. The swelling under her wedding dress was, even to a practised 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 fallen completely 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 breeze of relief went over the table. My grandfather, the mayor, had stood up, raised his glass and, glowing with pride and wine, drunk 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 meagre, 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, 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 down a job. My idea, assembling model aeroplanes to supplement the family income, had indeed become a plan. It was the plan that should save us.

TWO

And so we started building model aeroplanes. It was a warm spring that year, and the evenings were long and balmy, and despite the fine weather, we sat from early morning till late at night and worked 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 markings.

We lived in a bubble where everything was quiet and sheltered and friendly; the pot of tea steaming over a small flame, the sounds from the park behind our house drifting 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 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 toilets and smoked secretly in the cubicles, 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 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 banks. 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.

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