The Dream Room by Marcel Moring

Author:Marcel Moring [Moring, Marcel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2000-06-15T05:00:00+00:00

Three

EVEN THOUGH IT DIDN’T STOP RAINING, MY MOTHER and I went that summer, like every other summer, to the village in the dunes where her father had been mayor. He now spent his days polishing his old rifles, waiting for friends who, like him, had come to look more and more like shuffling old badgers. His wife wandered through the house with a wicker basket, in which she carried a bunch of keys and a cologne-soaked handkerchief. Her life was an endless opening and closing of doors, restless peering into empty rooms, and whispered mumbling. Ever since she had asked the baker for half a loaf of green and a loaf of plaid, sliced, they had had a housekeeper.

Those two weeks in the dunes had never been an excursion I’d particularly looked forward to. Even before she had gotten lost in the fog my grandmother had looked at me sideways, and my grandfather, for as long as I could remember, seemed to be awaiting the moment when I would prove myself a man, grab one of his old rifles, and shoot a prizewinning rabbit. Now that it wouldn’t stop raining, that annual visit was even less appealing. The bad weather however only seemed to increase my mother’s determination. According to her, it was usually better at the seaside, and the salty air would do me good.

A day after our arrival, my grandfather called me into what he referred to as his “study.” I hardly ever entered that room. It was at the back of the house and overlooked a rolling stretch of dunes covered with tough, sharp grass. In the distance you could see the first houses of the village he had governed half his life without much enthusiasm and where he now, in more ways than one, was an outsider. The walls were hung with tinted etchings of hunters riding horses frozen in a ludicrous swan dive. Here and there was a rifle leaning against the bookcase, and the smell of grease and gun oil was so overpowering that it could just as easily have been a gunsmith’s workshop.

My grandfather pointed me to a chair that came from the old council chamber, on the back of which was the faded, embroidered coat of arms of the village, a plump little fish that floated, grinning stupidly, above something that looked like the serrated blade of a knife, but was no doubt meant to represent the sea. “I’ve asked you here…” He cleared his throat, removed a book of illustrations of lushly colored pheasants from his chair, and lowered himself down. “I’ve asked you here, because you…well, because you’re nearly grown, a grown man, and it seemed to me that it was time we talked man…to man.” He looked visibly relieved to have the introduction over and done with. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had stood up, shaken my hand, and shown me to the door.

But he sat back, let his fingertips wander over the arm of the chair and, for a moment, seemed very far away.

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