The Dream Room Read online

  The Dream Room

  Marcel Möring

  For Sam

  Contents

  One

  WHEN, IN A SUDDEN SURGE OF PRIDE, HE GAVE UP…

  Two

  AND SO WE STARTED BUILDING MODEL AIRPLANES. Despite the fine…

  Three

  EVEN THOUGH IT DIDN’T STOP RAINING, MY MOTHER and I…

  Four

  SOMETIMES A CHILD—ELBOWS ON THE WORKBENCH, chin cupped in his…

  Other Books by Marcel Möring

  Copyright

  One

  WHEN, IN A SUDDEN SURGE OF PRIDE, HE GAVE UP his old job without actually having a new one, my father decided to build model airplanes. The Doll Hospital, which was just downstairs, was constantly visited by boys who came for a plastic Messerschmidt kit or Spitfire Mark V, but as soon as they saw the ready-made models that were hanging from the ceiling most of them wanted one of those instead. I had been there when a couple of boys once asked if they could buy one of those finished models.

  “They’re not for sale,” said the doll doctor. “They’re here to show what it looks like. It’s a kit. You’re supposed to build them yourself.”

  He began talking louder when he spoke to these boys, like an English tourist in France who thinks that it’s only a matter of speaking more slowly and loudly to make yourself understood.

  “But I don’t want to build them myself,” the boys replied.

  “What do you think?” roared the doll doctor. “You think I’ve got nothing better to do than spend the whole day building airplanes for you? Bugger off!”

  He was a man of little patience.

  Once a month, when he came up to collect the rent, the doll doctor would complain to my father. They’d sit in the old wicker chairs on the balcony that ran all along the back of the house, and drink beer. It was always evening when the doll doctor came.

  “In my day we did everything ourselves. My father even made me my first bicycle, out of the parts from three old bikes. Nowadays those brats can’t do a damn thing.”

  “Everything was better in the old days,” said my father.

  “God…How right you are.” The doll doctor drank his beer and let out a deep moan.

  “If you sold them ready-made,” I said, “you could ask more money for them.” I was leaning against the railing, looking out at the windows on the other side of the park behind our house. Sometimes, when my father and I were sitting on the balcony, we played a game: we tried to guess what they were doing and saying, in their little lamplit cubicles across the park. Usually it ended in some sort of radio play. “I told you not to dry your socks in the oven!” I’d shriek, and my father would slowly reply that drying socks in the oven was a better idea than making ice in a hot-water bottle (which I had tried once).

  “I don’t have time to build airplanes,” said the doll doctor. “And I don’t feel like it, either.”

  “I would let somebody else do it,” I said, “and I’d give him a few guilders per box and add that to the price of the kit, plus a bit extra. Nobody sells ready-made model planes. I think the customer is perfectly happy to pay more for something like that.”

  “And who is supposed to build them for me?” asked the doll doctor. He sounded pensive.

  I turned around. My father shook his head with a barely perceptible “no.” The doll doctor followed my gaze.

  “Boris! Damn! You’re an aviator. If you…I’ll give you a guilder a box.”

  My father sank back in his chair, groaning. I picked up my empty glass from the table and went inside.

  “Why a guilder?” I heard my father say. “And what does my being a pilot have to do with it?”

  “You can have fifty cents if you think a guilder is overpaid,” said the doll doctor.

  “If you want another beer…?”

  “Okay, one guilder fifty,” said the doll doctor. “That’s as high as I go. I have my margin to think of.”

  My father picked up the empty bottles and headed for the kitchen. “His margin,” he said, as he passed me. I was sitting on a stool behind the bar, reading a cookbook. “He who will get rich because of him will never be poor again.”

  “I heard that!”

  “You were supposed to,” said my father. He ducked into the steaming mouth of the refrigerator. When he reappeared, he looked at me for a long time. I pushed my glass toward him. He straightened his back and walked past me. “I’m not talking to you, sir,” he said. “You tricked me into this.” The doll doctor laughed. I picked up my glass and went to the fridge. “That’s the last one,” said my father. “In my day, a boy of your age would have been in bed hours ago.”

  “Everything was better in the old days,” drawled the doll doctor.

  “Now he’s telling me,” said my father.

  WHEN I CAME HOME from school the next day, the landing was packed with boxes with pictures of airplanes that rose up, grinning wickedly, out of grayish clouds of smoke, fire belching from their wings. The piles of cardboard were nearly up to my chin and formed a colorful wall of cardboard that ran from one end of the hallway to the other. On one of the piles stood a glass globe filled with water in which a tiny airplane was perched on a stand. There was a note from the doll doctor taped to the glass. My name was written on it. I took the globe in my hand. It began, hesitantly, to snow.

  “For a man who sells children’s toys, he really doesn’t have a clue when to stop,” said my father, when, half an hour later, he walked out onto the landing and found me there, amid the drifting piles of boxes. I still had my coat on and was sitting on the floor, the snow globe in my hand, dreaming about Hawker Hurricanes, Lancaster Bombers, and Focke Wulfs. “The boxes alone are good enough for you, aren’t they?” He kneeled down beside me and drew a long, rectangular-shaped package from out of the pile. There was a DC-3 on it, in desert camouflage, flying improbably low over a dusty plain, where long lines of yellowish-brown jeeps left tracks in the sand.

  “I used to fly a Dakota,” said my father. “Just after the war, when they would let you fly anything that had wings.” He stared over my head, at the shower curtain rods that were wedged between the side of the meter box and the living room wall and served as coatracks. I followed his gaze and saw him, young and tanned, cap askew, leaning out of the window of the plane as he was cracking a joke while the mechanic was inspecting the left propeller. A little farther down the sunlight bounced off the dull metal skin of the Nissen huts. High above the airstrip, where the tarmac disappeared into flat patches of dry grass, a small red spray plane turned its nose in the wind. “In those days, flying was just like riding a motorcycle,” he said. “You jumped into your crate and took off, and if you got hungry you just set her down in a field behind a village pub to get a plate of fried eggs.” He produced a thin smile and groaned as he got up. “Come on,” he said. “Help me carry in a pile of these boxes. We’re going to build a B-seventeen.”

  That night I made mushroom omelets, which we ate while gluing together the gray plastic pieces of airplane. The box had boasted a roaring flying fortress, her gun turrets spitting fire at viciously attacking Messerschmidts. What took shape in our hands, however, was a dull plastic lump with ugly welds. When the fuselage was finished, my father held it up doubtfully: “I’m beginning to understand why they all want to buy ready-made planes. This is a mess. What does he expect us to do next? Paint it?” In the hallway, next to the piles of boxes, I had seen a bag of tiny pots of paint and equally tiny brushes. When I told my father he grumbled to himself. “We’ll be the Fords of the model airplane industry, then. If you file down the welds, I’ll do the painting. We’ll divide up the assembly per model.”

  I thought of the wall of cardboard out in the hallway. I wasn’t really so sure that
, after this B-17, I wanted to build more planes.

  “Look, mate,” said my father. “This was your idea and I’m perfectly willing to carry it out, but not on my own. If you want to get rid of that pile, you’ll have to put your money where your mouth is.”

  I started to say something, but when I looked at him I saw he was dead serious. I stared down at the flotsam of plastic bits and pieces. If we went on at this rate we would have to assemble a plane every night for months to come. I looked at my father. My father looked at me. I sighed and lowered my head.

  There was a stumbling noise on the stairs. The coat hangers clicked against the shower rods. My mother opened the door and stared at the mess on the table. “What’s going on here? What are all those boxes doing in the hallway?” She looked disheveled. My father stood up and went over to her. He kissed her on the neck and turned around, so that they were both looking at me. “Be proud of your son,” he said. “He has come up with a wonderful idea that’s going to make us rich.”

  “How convenient,” said my mother. “I just got fired.” She wriggled out of my father’s half-embrace, kissed me on the head, and looked at the airplane-in-the-making that stood between the empty plates. “What is that?”

  “Fired?” There was a touch of concern in my father’s voice.

  “An airplane,” I said. “We’re building model airplanes for the doll doctor.”

  My mother looked from one to the other with an expression on her face as if we had just told her we were going to start a penguin farm in Greenland. “What did you have for tea?”

  “Mushroom omelets,” I said. “With fresh thyme.”

  “Did you let him cook again?” she said to my father.

  “He’s better at it than I am. Why were you fired?”

  “Time for bed,” said my mother. She laid her hand on the back of my neck and gave me a gentle squeeze. “They threw me out. For impertinence. I think I’m too old for this kind of work. I can’t stand it anymore when an overgrown child with a little mustache who’s just out of high school treats me like his slave.”

  “Oh, Lord,” said my father.

  I got up from my chair and let my mother lead me out of the room. As we passed my father he gave me a pensive look. He leaned down to kiss me good night. “That idea of yours,” he said, “just became a plan.”

  MY PARENTS FIRST MET when my father was brought into the hospital with so many broken bones that the osteopath told the head nurse to phone a colleague who liked doing jigsaw puzzles. My mother, who had just received her degree and was standing for the first time as a full-fledged nurse at a patient’s bedside, had failed to see the humor in it. She gazed at the tranquil face of the young man lying there on the white operating table and felt (highly unprofessional) compassion flooding her like a spring tide. His light, sun-bleached hair lay tousled on his forehead, and his face, despite the pain he must have felt before they had knocked him out, had the healthy complexion of someone who spent much of his time outdoors. No one in the hospital looked like that. No one she knew had his hair. And when they began to cut away his clothes she realized that she had never seen anyone with such a body. His limbs were bent where they shouldn’t have been and the left side of his chest and pelvis showed the first signs of hemorrhaging, but all the same he looked so familiar that she immediately knew his name. She called him Boris. (Later, when he woke up and was able to speak again, his name turned out to be Philip. That didn’t impress my mother. His parents had obviously made a mistake. This man was clearly a Boris. It was a name my father later accepted with pride, almost as if it was a mark of distinction, or a medal.)

  My mother had become a nurse because of the war. In 1944, just outside the village behind the dunes where she lived, a plane had crashed, and she and her friends had found the English pilot, still in his parachute, dangling from a poplar. He wasn’t too far from the ground, so the girls could clearly see his eyes rolled back in pain. His injuries proved to be less serious than they had thought—nothing but a dislocated shoulder—but the experience had made a lasting impression on my mother. The helplessness she felt when she found the pilot made her decide to devote her life to caring for her fellow man, for the weak and the sick: she was going to be a nurse. Her father, the mayor of the village, pointed out that a smart girl like her could be a doctor if she wanted to, but that was something she firmly rejected. In my mother’s eyes, doctors were unstable types who told young women to undress when all they had was a cold and roamed the dunes with the mayor, the local lawyer, and the vet, slurping noisily from pocket flasks and shooting helpless little rabbits. She was exaggerating, of course, but she wasn’t off the mark. My grandfather was a hunting fanatic whose chief misfortune in life was that the queen had sent him to a village in the dunes, where there wasn’t a decent deer to be found. And it was also true that he, as I was to discover on later visits, played bridge once every two weeks with the lawyer, the vet, and the village doctor, something that was really an excuse for heavy port and claret consumption. Whether the doctor actually did have his young patients undress for no medical reason, I don’t know, but I had noticed, on the few occasions when we were in the village and met him at my grandfather’s house, that he behaved rather nervously around my mother.

  My mother was what you would call a formidable woman. Both feet planted firmly on the ground and as certain of where she came from as where she was going. Somehow she was able to convince those around her, at a time when many women still regarded themselves as loyal subjects to their husbands, that she was a free and independent person and quite capable of leading her own life.

  But there was one thing she had forgotten to take into account; and that was her compassion, the way in which my father’s hair fell across his forehead and the boyish innocence of his broken body. When the osteopath’s scalpel made the first incision it was as if the knife penetrated her own skin, opened her flesh, laid bare her bones. Although this was not her first operation, she felt her knees shaking and before the first pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that my father’s legs were could be put back together, my mother lay in the next room, on a sofa, recovering from the first and only fainting spell of her life.

  My father had spent the war years in England. He was fifteen when the Netherlands were invaded and on the morning of May 10 he and his best friend found themselves on the grounds of the glider club, where men were taking down the wind socks and signposts in a naive attempt to prevent the enemy from landing. That was something that was, indeed, not to happen but most probably not because of the heroic resistance of the club members. The Germans seemed to have a lot more on their minds than capturing seventy yards of shorn grass and a couple of wooden sheds.

  That morning my father, for the first time in his life, had had a fight with his father. They were standing in the sunny parlor listening to the radio, when my father said they should leave the country. My grandfather shook his head. He had a business to run, a firm that dealt in colorings and flavorings for the food industry, and he wasn’t going to give up without a struggle everything he had built up over the last twenty years. He asked his son how he supposed they would survive in another country, with no money, no possessions, no chance of work or housing. “But that’s exactly the point: survival,” said my father. “Money and property are replaceable. Life is not.” My grandfather had told him that he was being irresponsible, that he on the other hand had obligations toward other people, not just the family, but the people who worked for him. “They can save themselves!” my father had cried. My grandfather’s eyes had blazed and he had said that he had always taken good care of his people and that now, now that things were really down to the crunch, he would keep on doing that. After that he had forbidden his son to speak anymore about the subject and my father stalked out of the door, angry and desperate, grabbed his bicycle, and rode to the glider field. On the way he saw people taping up the windows of their houses and packing suitcases into the trunks of their cars.

  At the club they were
busy dismantling the airstrips. The winch was still there at the end of the runway and his friend Benno, two years his senior, was standing beside it, waiting for the cart to take it away.

  “I want to go up, just one more time,” said my father suddenly.

  “They’ll never let you.” Benno said.

  “No, but I can do it if you help me. We might not be able to fly again for another three or four years.”

  “You’ll be suspended if you fly without permission.”

  “What difference does it make, if I can’t fly anymore anyway? Come on, Benno. Just once.”

  Benno looked around nervously. The governors were sitting in the wooden clubhouse drinking coffee and discussing the future. The sun was behind them and it was very unlikely that anyone would be able to see, with all that light in their eyes, what was going on farther down the airstrip. When they heard the winch starting up, they might come running. But by then it would be too late.

  The boys ran to the hangar and rolled out the last plane that had been brought in. It was the chairman’s plane, and it had been standing on the airstrip that morning, ready for takeoff, when the news came in about the invasion. As they lifted the slender wings and began pushing the plane out the door, Benno looked at my father over the top of the fuselage. “I know what you’re doing,” he said. My father, who didn’t even know himself what he was doing, said nothing. “I’m going to be in trouble with the whole club and your whole family. This is Hendriks’s plane, and he’s the town clerk. What’s he going to say when he sees you taking off…” The plane was now at the start of the airstrip. Benno ran to the winch to get the tow cable. My father lifted up the canopy and inspected the cockpit. When Benno came back and hooked him up to the cable, my father, who was beginning to understand what his friend had meant, said: “Why don’t you come with me, Benno? Anything is better than staying.” The other boy shook his head. “Somebody’s got to work the winch. I don’t want to run out on my family.” They both stared down at the dry grass. Then Benno turned and started running back to the winch. My father crawled into the cockpit and shut the canopy.