[Vladan Desnica, novelist,
story-teller, poet and essayist, born in
This
is quite a simple story. Something like it could happen to anyone. It all
depends on whether we set out in that direction, and then,–the rest takes care
of itself.
Let
us imagine a man, quite an ordinary man, an average human like a thousand
others, dreaming one night–(and what may one dream about, what various things
come to man’s mind in dreams! But is that reason enough to draw conclusions
from them?–Dreams are, after all, pure fantasy, there are no logical rules or
laws about them!) well, to go on, a man dreaming one
night about a monk with a green beard. Or, if you will, a
monk with a squint in his left eye. Or anything else of this kind–it
matters not! Anything at all! Because, in his dreams, a man sees such things as
would take him more than a hundred years to envision in a waking state. He may
dream, for instance, of a ‘man without buttons’, that is, of a man who simply
hasn’t got a single button on his clothes. Not that his buttons have fallen
off, and the bits of thread can still be seen where they were once sown, but
simply without any buttons, as though he had gone through his whole life
without them; and even without button-holes. A thing, as one
can see, not particularly unusual, or fantastic, and while awake, not really
awe-inspiring. But in dreams, such a buttonless
man can acquire a certain similarity, a certain vague relationship with that
aquatic animal which is usually called a “man-fish”, or in general, with some
blind eyeless fish, with soft, rosy flesh.
But
let us not digress. Let us not lose the logical thread of our story. Let us
remain with the “friar with the green beard”, as long as we
have chosen that example. Well, as we were saying, a man one night dreamt of a
monk with a green beard. Very well. Throughout the
whole of the following day, he no longer gave this a thought. But that night
before going to bed, just as he was peeling off his right sock, it suddenly
occurred to him that he might dream of the friar again that night. That night,
though, went by, without his dreaming of him. And the next morning, while going
to the office he thought: just imagine, “I didn’t dream of the friar with the
green beard, after all.”
But
matters need not take such a course. The opposite can happen: the man might not
think of the friar in the daytime and yet dream of him that very night. These
two cases are in fact identical; both the alternatives lead to the same thing.
But let us rather remain with the first possibility since we have already set
out in that direction. Well, then, that evening he thinks about the friar but
fails to dream of him. And so on the next evening, and the third, and the
fourth. And every morning, while washing his face and shaving, he would think,
“Well, last night I didn’t dream of him again.” (Already in his thoughts he had
begun to refer to him in familiar terms, using the masculine pronoun.) And such
a thought would occur to him with a quick little sense of pleasure. As though he were putting a saved-up coin every morning into a
small cash-box. And then there came the morning when he did not think of
the friar. But that was why on the following night he dreamed of him again.
Then, for some time, every day he either dreamed of the friar or thought about
him, and some times it was both.
And
then a scandal broke in the office. Quite understandably, in such a situation
anyone would forget a Score of more important things than a mere friar! A big
embezzlement affair had been, discovered in his department, and all the
employees, including himself, were subjected to
questioning. That was the law. He, however, was completely calm. From the very
first moment, he realized by the tone of voice of his questioners, that he was
under no suspicion whatever. Still, such things were always unpleasant. But
that also passed. And a week later (it was a fine, sunny day, and after lunch,
he went to the zoo for a walk) he recalled with pleasure, that during the whole
of the investigation at the office, he had neither thought of the friar nor
dreamed of him. Even now he would never have thought of him, had not a priest
passed by him along the walk. True, this was a priest and not a friar, the priest did not have a beard, much less a green
one. But that’s what our memories are like: sometimes we remember things by
association, through similarity, and sometimes through contrasts. And, I might
almost say, more frequently through contrasts. If, for example, we have a small
dog whose right eye has been knocked out, and, somewhere, we see another small
dog whose left eye is missing, we might cry out: Well, now, this one lacks an
eye, tll! Only mine wants a right eye and this dog
a left one. And I firmly believe that this small dog without a left eye will
remind us no less of the one we own without his right eye, than if this one,
too, were deprived of a right eye like our own dog. And, by this same logic,
when we see a cat without a left eye, we’ll say: See, this one lacks an eye
like my Tootsi, except that the cat has no left eye
and my doggie no right eye, and that this is a cat, while Tootsi
is a dog. Also, if we see a dog which has no eyes missing at all, we might say:
See, just like poor Tootsie, except that he has both eyes! And as all things
are of necessity mutually similar or dissimilar, the conclusion might be drawn
that every object can remind us of every other object. Here, then, all this
brings me to the idea that those things which remind us of something else, need
not depend on some similarity, or dissimilarity, but on something quite
different. On what, I don’t know! But, I’m Sure it’s
something which, regardless of similarities and dissimilarities, lies deep
under the ocean, like a cable.
Of
course, that evening, while undressing, he again thought of the friar. And in
the morning, while shaving, he said to himself: “How strange, yesterday I thought
so much about him, and yet I didn’t dream of him! I might almost say that when
throughout the whole day I keep thinking of him and expect with certainty to
dream about him, I don’t dream of him at all, but if while I am awake I don’t
even give him a thought, then, sure enough, he appears in my dreams! Very
strange! Looks as though I must think about him quite
intensely in the daytime so as not to dream of him at night!”
“Nonsense”–he
said, finally, with a wave of his hand. And when he arrived at the office, he
looked at his desk calendar, grasped a few random leaves and turned over a fat
sheaf of them on to a date in the distant future and wrote the words: ‘the
Friar’, in blue pencil. He did this because he recalled how in his
childhood, after having recovered from an attack of influenza, a low persistent
fever had continued. Only a few degrees above normal but still, there it was.
His mother was already beside herself with anxiety: “How long will this last,
doctor?”–and, ‘what shall we do, doctor?”–were the words she addressed to the
family physician, whereas he, an elderly and experienced individual, thick-set
and short of breath, was not in the least perturbed. “Simply stop taking the
child’s temperature,” he had advised phlegmatically. “Let the child go to
school and let him play with the others. And then, when you take his
temperature a few days later, you’ll see how it’ll all be gone.” And indeed,
that’s the way it was. At present he thought: that’s how it’s going to be now.
I’ll stop taking the temperature!
And
this really helped. At first, he thought about the friar less and less
frequently until he finally dropped him entirely from his thoughts. Almost two
months went by without his ever thinking of the friar, either asleep or awake.
And then, one morning, all unwittingly, he turned a page of the calendar–and
there was the friar. From then on, he kept recurring to him with growing
frequency, if not at all times, at least whenever he glanced at the calendar.
Everything that the calendar stood for seemed now to be closely bound up with
the friar: the former stuck to the latter as when two caramel
chocolates stick to each other in a paper bag inside a warm
pocket; everything in connection with the calendar now reminded him of the
friar, and whatever had associations with the friar, such things as church, an
altar, and the like, he would again be reminded of both the calendar and the
friar. If he met a funeral procession, immediately the friar came to his mind!
If he saw in a shopwindow of the Farmers’
Co-operative, an agricultural calendar–again the friar stood in his mind’s eye.
If, while waiting in the ante-chamber of his chief to get his signature, his
eye chanced to fall on a calendar, the mind would at once be occupied with the
idea of the friar. In his dreams, it is true, the
friar made his appearances less frequently, but somehow in more regular, almost
fixed, intervals of time. And it appeared to him that now he could correctly
foretell those nightly visits, that he knew exactly which was the “friar’s
day”, just as one knows the charwoman’s day, when the collector of electricity
rates is to call. Yet, for some time all went well. But then logic came into
play, that devillish logic which comes at the end to
spoil all that which illogicality cannot undo: in the mornings, now, he no
longer asked himself whether he had dreamed of the friar or not, nor did this
give him the slightest pleasure any more; it was, in fact, inconsequential. He realised that between the words: ‘I dreamed of the friar’
and ‘I did not dream of the friar’, the whole difference lay in the ‘did’ and
‘did not’ but that in both cases the ‘friar’ remained an unchanging and
permanent quantity. He remembered how every morning, while shaving, he had
naively enjoyed the thought: “Well, I didn’t dream of him last night,” or
“Well, I wasn’t thinking of him today,” and he smiled bitterly to himself
saying: “What a fool I was! Did not thinking about how he didn’t think of the
friar really amount to thinking of him, in fact?” And this critical thought at
once demolished all others: it was only some kind of metastasis of the friar.
So that, turn this way or that, asleep or awake, as a daytime visitor or
nightly guest–the friar was there! And at once it struck him that during all
that time, from the very beginning, during the investigation at the office, and
all the while up to the fateful turning of the calendar’s pages, the friar,
invisible, was there all the time, right behind the curtain. And one morning,
while shaving, he stopped and groaned in the middle of the empty, white,
bathroom: “Oh, if only I could forget…only forget...” He drew the razor several
times down his cheek, and again stopped short, “But what is forgetfulness? And
can one ever be completely calm? Even if it settles upon you, how can one know
if that is the real, final, genuine, forgetfulness or only temporary oblivion?
On what grounds could one reckon with certainty, that one day, some chance
encounter, some little trifle, anything at all, would not at once and unexpectedly,
and thereby powerfully, reawaken the idea of the friar?” He lay the razor on
the cold, white, porcelain shelf above the sink, looking at his haggard face
and shadowed eyes in the mirror, and said out loud: “There’s no salvation for
me.” His voice sent shivers down his spine.
But
Man is strong. Man is a resistant creature, a stubborn, wiry being. Man does
not give in so easily. And he began trying to defend himself with the same
weapon, that same “logical thought” that had ruined everything before. He began
rationalising: actually, “to think of the friar” was
not the same as “to think of one’s thoughts about the friar,” although at first
glance it did seem the same thing, it really wasn’t! There was a small shade of
difference in this. In the first case, the friar was something which stands
above me, something which tyrannizes me, something which governs and controls
me: in the former case, he is the master, and I has slave; in the latter case,
it is he who is subservient to me, he is my object. The object of my thoughts.
In this, then, I am still the master.
There,
that was a possibility. Another way out of the whole thing. Perhaps the only
way. And the man really calmed down this time. Once again he found the will to
live. On sunny afternoons he sometimes went for walks in the zoological
gardens. He even gained a few kilograms in weight. This was obviously a good
sign. From then on, he regularly weighed himself. And already he thought of the
friar without anxiety, without any particular repercussions, almost
nonchalantly. “In time, he’ll completely disappear,” he reassured himself. And
from the very fact that the friar became unimportant to him, it followed of
itself that he thought of him less and less frequently. It was like being in
love: as soon as you got the first signs that she returned your love, you
became cockier; already you could afford the luxury of diverting your thoughts
from her from time to time, for the sake of a bit of change. It was like that
in everything, the question always being: who is stronger, who is the master:
you or she, you or the friar?
One
Saturday, while he was sharpening his razor, he caught, himself whistling.
“It’s been ages since I’ve whistled!” he said to himself. And then he went to
the movies. It turned out to be stuff and nonsense. A silly improbable love
story, fit only for tea-shop waitresses or young hair dressers. That evening,
while undressing, something fell out of his pocket onto the small rug in front
of his bed. He bent down to pick it up: it was his latest weighing-machine
ticket. He re-read the figures printed on it and once again rubbed his hands
with satisfaction over the fact that he had gained some more weight. He smiled:
“Looks as if I’ve really got rid of him at last.”
But
that very night, he dreamed of the friar again. He seemed a bit thinner. He
smiled sourly, winking his left eye and shaking his forefinger: “You are
mistaken, my friend, sadly mistaken.. Come what may, I’m inside you for good.
Remember–you will never be able to drive me away.”
And
then-then! there really was no more hope for him.