The Dream Room

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

One

Two

Three

Four

About the Author

Praise for The Dream Room

Other Works

Copyright

About the Publisher

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 aeroplanes. The Doll Hospital, which was just downstairs, was constantly visited by kids who came for a plastic Messerschmidt 109 kit or a 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 once when a couple of boys 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 always 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 invariably replied.

‘What do you think?’ roared the doll doctor. ‘You think I’ve got nothing better to do than spend the whole day building aeroplanes 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. Those modern kids can’t do anything.’

‘Everything was better in the old days,’ said my father.

‘God … How right you are.’ The doll doctor drank his beer and sighed.

‘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 aeroplanes,’ 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 would be 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 too much,’ 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 gets 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 towards him. He straightened his back and walked past me. ‘I’m not talking to you, Sonny Jim,’ he said. ‘You got me roped into this.’ The doll doctor laughed. I picked up my glass and went to the fridge. ‘That’s the last one,’ my father said. ‘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 tells me,’ said my father.

When I came home from school the next day, the landing was packed with boxes with pictures of aeroplanes that rose up, grinning wickedly, out of greyish clouds of smoke, fire belching from their wings. The piles of cardboard were nearly up to my chin and formed a colourful wall 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 was perched a tiny aeroplane 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 sat 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 DC3 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 coat racks. 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 and went in 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 B17.’

That night I made mushroom omelettes, which we ate while gluing together the grey plastic pieces of aeroplane. The box had boasted a roaring flying fortress, her gun turrets spitting fire at viciously attacking Messerschmidts. What actually 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 aeroplane 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 sure that, after this B17,1 wanted to build more planes.

‘Look, son,’ 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 deadly 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 dishevelled. 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. ‘You should be proud of your son,’ he said. ‘He has come up with a wonderful idea to make us rich.’

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

‘The sack?’ There was a touch of concern in my father’s voice.

‘An aeroplane,’ I said. ‘We’re building model aeroplanes 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 omelettes,’ 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 sacked?’

‘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 some overgrown child with a little moustache who’s just out of 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 goodnight. ‘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 qualified and was standing for the first time as a fully-fledged nurse at a patient’s bedside, had failed to see the humour 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 haemorrhaging, 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 an 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 far 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, one of the few places in the country 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 a fortnight 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 that, 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’d 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, at a time when many women still regarded themselves as their husbands’ loyal subjects, she was able to convince those around her 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 were my father’s legs could be put back together, my mother lay on a little bench in the next room, recovering from her first, and only, fainting spell.

My father had spent the war years in England. He was fifteen when the Netherlands were invaded and on the morning of May the tenth he and his best friend found themselves in the grounds of the glider club, where men were taking down the windsocks 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 front room 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 colourings and flavourings 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 towards 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 any more about the subject and my father had stalked out of the door, angry and desperate, grabbed his bicycle and ridden 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.

‘But if you’d 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 take-off, 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,’ Benno said. ‘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. And besides, I don’t want to leave my family.’ They both stared down at the dry grass. Then Benno turned and ran back to the winch. My father crawled into the cockpit and shut the canopy.

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 aeroplane 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 by 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 updraught 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, then in the little planes that sprayed the endless fields of grain on the reclaimed land of the Zuyderzee Polders. Later still, when the country was prosperous again, he and his fellow pilots also flew over the smaller fields 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 fried eggs.

Different people will give different periods in their lives as a clear point in time, the moment when life itself suddenly seems so simple, and things and events seem to fit together with such ease, that one later wonders how on earth life could have been so obvious, what the secret was. There probably is no secret, it’s the kind of 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 coloured 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, the 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 railway lines 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 favourite 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, the kerosene would get to the engine again.

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 towards 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 that, 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 pairs of 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 afterwards 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 the 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.