The Dream Room Read online

  Even before he felt the first tug of the cable, he began to have second thoughts. Leave his family…His father was right. He was responsible for the people who worked for him. The airplane slid across the grass and righted itself. He had to stay. He was responsible, too. He had to help his father. They can save themselves…How could he have…The plane cleared the ground. Benno, who was standing in the distance next to the winch, zoomed in closer. My father felt the explosion of pleasure in his stomach that he always felt when he was airborne. He was pressed back in his seat. He adjusted the trim, the airstrip disappeared under the nose of the plane, and he began climbing.

  When he was free of the cable and looked back over his right wing he saw, far down below, over his shoulder, a tiny group of people standing between the clubhouse and the winch. Suddenly his doubts vanished. The field went shooting under him as he steered a course for the dunes, which were a distant yellow strip in the green countryside. Once he was flying over the sand he would use the updraft to gain height. It was a sunny day and there would undoubtedly be a thermal to give him the lift he needed for a good point of departure.

  He reached England, though just barely. He had no map, navigated by means of the sun and his watch, but at the end of the day, flying dangerously low, the coast appeared and he managed, hungry, exhausted, dying of thirst, to set the glider down just outside a village. A month later he was taken in as a boarder by a Dutch family living in London and two years after that he began his training as a fighter pilot.

  It was this training that enabled him to earn a living after the war: first flying a mail plane, later in the little planes that sprayed the endless fields of grain on the new land of the Zuider Zee Polders. Later still, when the country was prosperous again, he and his fellow pilots also flew over the smaller fields of farmers on old land where they’d dive down behind one row of trees, let the mist billow behind their wings, and then shoot back up, just before the next wooded bank. Those were the days when, as my father had told me, they’d land at noon in a meadow behind a village pub, climb out of the cockpit, and go inside for a plate of ham and fried eggs.

  Different people will give different periods in their lives as a clear point in time, the moment when life itself suddenly seems simple and obvious, and when things and events seem to fit together with such ease that one will later wonder how on earth life could have been so obvious, what the secret was. There probably is no secret, it’s the kind of memory, a memory that plays up more strongly than all the rest, a recollection tinged with melancholy and regret that makes one yearn for those days of freedom, the seeming wealth of possibilities, the first nudge in the back that later becomes the rhythm of life itself, grown-up life. For my father, that clear point in time was back in the days when he flew a spray plane. He never spoke about the war. He had fought in it, he had survived, he had known friendship and disappointment. For some strange reason those days, for him, were not colored by romantic notions. The few instances in which he spoke about his life as a fighter pilot, his mouth grew thin and tight and he invariably said that war was a filthy business. But in that spray plane, he felt better than ever before. He could do anything, he did everything, he saw everything, he knew everything. When he flew, his mind emptied and there was nothing but the thrust of the plane, the slow movement of his head to the left, glance over his shoulder, toward the swelling horizon, the green that filled his range of vision until he began to roll and the grass and the trees and the houses and the roads and the railroad tracks whirled around him in a haze.

  One morning in June, after he had sprayed a potato field and was flying low over the roof of the adjacent farm, he saw the farmer’s wife and her children standing on the gravel next to the barn. He picked up speed, rolled to the right (his least favorite side, but to the left was a row of tall poplars), and shot back across the field. Somewhere above the wooded bank that bounded the land, he brought up the nose until he felt the upward thrust fighting the downward pull. He kept on pulling the stick, looked left, and saw the horizon swerve. At the height of the loop, the engine sputtered. That often happened if the plane rose sheer for too long, the fuel pipes sometimes emptied. As soon as the nose was pointed down again, the kerosene would get to the engine.

  But this time it didn’t. The horizon tilted, the nose dropped, the engine remained silent. He pulled the stick back, aware that he had insufficient height to come back around if the engine didn’t ignite. Then he heard it, the harsh roar. The nose went up; the potato field, which had been coming straight at him, went gliding under him. Now he was flying so low that the tops of the trees at the edge of the field seemed to tower above him. He threw the stick left and pulled it toward him. The wooded bank became a haze and disappeared. He had no time to look over his shoulder, but knew he was flying dangerously close to the ground. He pressed back in his seat, pulling hard on the control stick. Now he could no longer see the trees. He pulled a little more, moved the control stick to the middle and noticed that he only had a little speed left. The engine sputtered again and fell silent. He was now drifting crookedly over the field, at a height of ninety feet or so, a wooden fence before him, and behind him, a ditch, meadow, and cows. He pulled left slightly and kept on turning. The farm came into view again. Standing there, like tiny figures drawn in pencil, were the farmer’s wife and her children. He could clearly see that they were waving. Five insect legs against the wall of the barn. He screamed with anger and helplessness, rammed his fist down on the start button, heard nothing, and yanked the stick to the right. The plane shot over the fence. Shortly afterward he felt the ground, the wild jolting as he bounced over the bumpy meadow. He could barely see in front of him and when the left wing hit a cow’s head and he lost the last bit of control he had over the plane, he was so amazed that, for an entire second, he forgot everything else.

  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 proudly. 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 behavior 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 landlady in a vil
lage not far from the airstrip from which he and his mates 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 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 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?”