tell him how the physics teacher made fun of us in front of the whole class. How during a football match Luke deliberately aimed a kick at our shins. How we combed our hair with a comb we found lying on Katya’s table, and how she lifted the comb in the air so the whole of the class could see it, and shouted: “Does anyone have a strong disinfectant?” As long as I believed that half of my life belonged to Abortus I felt only half the anxiety I would have felt otherwise. Of course I also shared pleasant things with him. Whenever Minny smiled at me in the school corridor, or the headmaster said that if I had less imagination and a trifle more perseverance I would definitely be the star pupil, I did not keep this to myself. I shared it with my little brother as though it was meant for him anyway, and I was no more than a transmitting agent.
We communicated in a seemingly simple way: I would talk, and he would listen. He would respond in his own way. At first I would connect the barely noticeable changes in his expression with the light which was coming in through the window, and which shifted every time a cloud passed before the sun or the tree branches swayed in the wind. But gradually I began to see the almost imperceptible movement of shadow and light round his mouth and eyes as his way of responding to my words. Step by step, we developed a way of communicating which enabled us to exchange information and views on a number of things. In my loneliness there was no one I could talk to as openly as I could to my little brother. Talking to Father was interesting, but not always warm or intimate; it seemed to me that for anything like that Father simply couldn’t find the time. Which, of course, did not mean he didn’t love me. Talking to Mother was mostly a pain: because of her incessant worrying about the respectability of our family she would mostly instruct me what to do and what not to do, while I would defy her by remaining stubbornly silent. Only to Abortus could I talk as an equal, as one half to the other half; only together were we a complete person.
So it seemed natural to entrust to him for safekeeping my dream diary, not only Dreams I but also Dreams II. In the tight space between the jar and the wall behind it the two notebooks were completely hidden from view by Abortus and the liquid surrounding him. The chances of Father stumbling upon them accidentally were practically non-existent. In any case he wasn’t coming to the basement because of Abortus or other glass jars. The objects of his scientific research were housed in containers which lined the shelves on the other side of the window. These containers, also made of glass, had unusual shapes: one was formed into a spiral, another was pinched in the middle like a sand-glass, the third resembled a large smoking pipe, and yet another a canon on two large wheels. There were others, less definable, resembling cucumbers, mushrooms, pears, elephants. Every so often a new surprisingly shaped container would appear on the shelf; Father was getting them by special order from the nearby glass-works.
All these containers housed tiny trees, mushrooms and other, more unusual botanical specimens, all of them grown to fit the shape of their particular glass enclosure. The spiral container housed a little pine tree which had spiralled into the most unusual growth I had ever seen, shocking in its deformation and yet profoundly beautiful. The sand-glass contained a cactus pinched in the middle, and the smoking pipe was the home of the most unusual tropical flower, with a pink blossom sticking out of the sucking end, and a blue one out of the filling end. There were some rather witty jokes among Father’s achievements in the art of growing bonsai: a mushroom grown to resemble a cucumber, and a cucumber grown to resemble a mushroom.
I knew that this was “the art of growing bonsai” because lying on one of the shelves nearby was a large book bearing such a title. I had leafed through it many times. But no photograph in the book showed anything remotely as beautiful as the strange living things produced by Father during his secret sojourns in the basement.
It is only now, after all these years, that I am beginning to understand why he refused to share those experiments with Mother and me, or with anyone else for that matter. He probably felt just as alone in the world as I did, and needed something that would be his, and only his, in the same way that I wouldn’t tell anybody about my little brother. Any knowledge about our special relationship by a third party would have robbed it of its uniqueness, which lay in the fact that Abortus, such as I saw him, was the product of my imagination, my artwork. In the same way Father must have felt that letting others in on his solitary efforts to add beauty of his own design to an ugly world would have spoiled the beauty and made his efforts commonplace.
I did not feel any guilt for being a party to his secret. I was too young to know what I know now. What I did feel was that Father’s obsession was for him the only way to counterbalance the ugliness of disease and death he had to face daily in his surgery.
6
Like the basement, Father’s surgery, too, was not inaccessible to a boy of my ingenuity. The health centre was situated in an old building in which cracks and gaps were appearing all over the place. One such gap I had discovered by accident a year or so earlier when I climbed the fire-escape stairs at the side of the building and squeezed through a wooden hatch into the loft. Between the wall of the chimney and the wooden ceiling I found a gap wide enough to offer me a good view of the surgery below. Since then I had spent many an hour observing Father at work, sometimes even missing school, for I preferred to get acquainted with biology and anatomy in a more direct way.
The gap was a little too small to offer me the view of the entire room, but the examining table was right below, next to the wall of the chimney. A little further on, close to the door, I could see part of another table, which belonged to Nurse Mary. It was covered by an incredible jumble of medical files and pills and ointments in various types of packaging, all mixed together in an appalling way. Sometimes Nurse Mary had to sift through the disarray for ten minutes before she managed to locate the file for the patient already stretched out on the examining table, while Father accompanied her frantic search with his usual cynical remarks, tired of having to repeat them day after day.
As a doctor my Father was never at a loss for words. In fact he talked incessantly, while Nurse Mary, being the quiet type, contributed little more than an occasional “yes, doctor” or “no, doctor”, which, when they were alone in the room, became “yes” or “no”. To his patients, regardless of their age, sex or rank, Father talked in the tone of someone who was aware of his position of power, and determined to exploit it to the full. Humorously berating those who disregarded his advice seemed to be one of the greatest pleasures of his life. But he could also be patient and kind, and would spend minutes explaining to a hard-of-hearing old lady how often and in what manner to take the pills he prescribed. Sometimes he would do that three times in a row. It was at moments like those that I realised how good my father really was, and how his oddities were no more than harmless traits of someone who, because of his extraordinary abilities, could not possibly behave like an ordinary mortal.
Peering through the gap in the ceiling, I managed to witness so many unusual things that eventually there was nothing much left that could shock me. I would see examinations during which Father would peer inside female sexual organs through a long tube; I would see broken limbs, hips, and jaws; I would see dermatitis and gangrene and the birth of children, where my Father was always eager to assist, although Nurse Mary was also a qualified midwife. I would see children with mumps, chicken-pox and boils on their behinds; I would see people fainting after a single injection, followed by revival attempts that sometimes lasted an hour. I would see wounds from which blood was gushing in spurts. I would see nails in skulls and slit throats, and mad people who at the top of their voice shouted words no one could understand. And children, battered almost to death by their parents.
Inevitably there came the moment when things began to repeat themselves, and when the odour of blood and decay started to turn me off. Sometimes, peering through the gap in the ceiling, I would doze off, especially during summer, when the air in the loft grew unbearably hot. Or I would suddenly start feeling dizzy, believing that I was actually dreaming what I thought I saw in the surgery. When I began to have frequent and very visual dreams about Father and Eve, and the line between the inner and outer worlds started to fade, this went a step further and very often it seemed
