The Book of Dreams

by Nina George

  Two days later we fly to Paris via Cairo. Marie-France nods off against my shoulder as we cruise over the Mediterranean. She’s embarrassed when she wakes up and huddles against the misted-up window for the rest of the journey.

  Standing facing each other in the blue-gray light of Charles de Gaulle Airport among the holidaymakers, suits, trolley cases, and Air France stewardesses in their short pencil skirts, I ask her, “Do you want to see me again?”

  She shrugs, which could mean “I don’t know” or “Ask me once more.” I don’t know much about her. She’s twenty-seven, doesn’t like children, loves painting, and refuses to drink rosé wine.

  “Not necessary,” Marie-France drawls. She has a particular way of tucking her hair behind her ear while she fixes me with those big, insecure, girlish eyes.

  I think of the murderer who was once called Akol until he lost his identity and became Boy.

  There are some women, I think, who say no because they’d like to be persuaded and because they don’t want to be the one who said yes, the sign that they’ve lost.

  I think of a path that only becomes apparent when you take it, as in Indiana Jones.

  I shift my heavy bag onto my other shoulder. I feel my flight instinct urging me to turn on my heel and walk away, fast. Part of me doesn’t want to explore the path that’s opening up among the arrivals and departures in the long airport halls. This part of me simply wants to return to London, do the washing, go to the pub, get drunk until I feel like sleeping, and then sleep for a month and then set off for somewhere new. Anywhere but home.

  That’s what always happens. No sooner have I slept with a woman than I’m already on my way out of the door.

  I imagine what it’d be like not to see each other again, ever. The first hours would be a mixture of relief and shame. It would be forgivable: most journalists sleep with one another on overseas trips. But Marie-France might be pregnant with our son. She’d probably have an abortion because I jumped on the next British Airways flight with sufficient stocks of gin on board, rather than agreeing to stay and start a family.

  I must be mad!

  “Okay then,” says Marie-France, bending down to pick up her camera bag and her rucksack.

  Now, I think. Say it, Henri! Do things differently this time.

  That same old “this time”!

  “Take care,” she mumbles, and leans forward for the obligatory kiss on each cheek. Air-kiss left, air-kiss right.

  Go? Or stay?

  I’m overcome with curiosity at the completely fresh possibilities I might discover by staying in Paris with Marie-France instead of returning to London or flying on to Kabul. A jolt inside me. Come on! Be an adult for once!

  And yet…I don’t know where this contrariness comes from. It’s accompanied by a sense of “this time, this way.”

  As we touch cheeks for an extra kiss, I whisper, “I’d like to stay with you,” but even as I speak the words I know it isn’t true. I dismiss my shock, thinking that this must be normal and every man feels this way the first time he stays.

  She hugs me tightly and whispers, “I still hate you, but not as much as I did,” and clings to me.

  I skip my onward flight to London, don’t take my other flight to Kabul, and stay in Paris instead. Three months later, Marie-France shows me the ultrasound scan. “I want the child, but I don’t want you,” she says.

  “Of course you don’t want me. You’re always saying that. But I don’t believe you, so I’m going to stay on regardless.”

  She throws her arms around my neck and says, “You’re right.” But she never says “I love you” because she can’t and neither can I. I do know Marie-France well enough, though, to realize that she’s continually testing my affection for her. She’s looking for proof that I want her. She keeps sending me away so that then I can come back to her. This is the only way for it almost to be love, because we both know that it isn’t really.

  It’s the miracle of that night. Our son, Samuel Noam, is a child of fear. Speechless at the idea of how we might deal with this miracle if we don’t stay together, we stay together. Marie-France sets only one condition. “If the child is born, don’t go off to war again. I don’t want him to be scared for you.”

  I keep my promise.

  * * *

  —

  I spend three and a half years reassuring Marie-France that I’m going to stay with her, even when she says she doesn’t want that. She wins a prize for her photo of Nelson’s cowrie necklace, and I get a part-time job at Le Monde. I don’t go to war again.

  Samuel’s a delicate child. Marie-France often despairs when our little darling suddenly refuses to continue walking or begins to wail when he’s forced to enter an unfamiliar room. She never tires of getting up at night when the little chap is plagued by dreams, pointing at shadows and huddling in the farthest corner of his crib. She carries him, she consoles him, but she doesn’t know what I know about those dreams. I soon move into Samuel’s room. Marie-France is jealous and at the same time grateful that I find it so easy to care for our son. Her gratitude is sincere and tender, and we spend some wonderful times together. I never find Sam too hard to handle—not for one second. For ages he can’t talk properly and when he does speak, the nursery school teachers report that he says strange things. The speech therapist is also concerned. I’m the only one who doesn’t find the things he says weird. The words sound a bit like Tibetan or as if he learned words in his dreams that may well be logical descriptions of the things he sees during his nighttime adventures. It’s just that no one in the real world understands his language.

  Marie-France sleeps with her boss. Her boss’s wife tells me this one day and even suggests we should have an affair—“To balance things out, mon cher.” However, I think of Sam and the fact that he already reacts quite violently to his mother’s efforts to keep her liaison secret from us—something that is both good and a cause of terrible worry for her. Yes, Sam can feel and empathize with his mother, and that might be another reason I don’t hold it against her, for my son learns to feel what I feel. When Marie-France treats him with indifference, he isn’t spiteful toward her but loving. He runs over to her on those chubby little legs and climbs onto her chair to stroke her cheek. I sometimes have the impression that he catches her moods as he might a cold.

  I turn down Marie-France’s boss’s wife’s offer.

  I watch Marie-France for a while, listening to the excuses she invents and her lies about where she is and when. Like many women, she commits the cardinal mistake of wanting to make love with me more often than ever before, as if every legitimate hour with me offsets a forbidden hour with him. I’m touched by her inner turmoil. Sometimes I’d like her to feel ashamed, but ultimately I wish, for all our sakes, that we could simply be honest with each other.

  I usually decline to have sex with her, and she’s relieved and simultaneously restless and suspicious. “Who are you sleeping with if not with me?” she asks one day when we haven’t held each other’s naked bodies for three or four months.

  “How about you?” I retort. “Still sleeping with Claude?”

  “I hate you,” she whispers, and I can see why. We hate people who don’t show any hurt when they’re being cheated on. Yet I genuinely don’t feel aggrieved. I don’t really care. I even hope she loves him: it’d do her a lot of good to love someone.

  She suffers from the knowledge that I don’t love her, but the miracle that came into our lives is still powerful enough to bind us together—our miracle child, even if Sam is more foreign to her than to me.

  I reckon that if her boss, Claude, were to separate from his wife, Chantal, tomorrow morning, Marie-France would have moved in with him by the evening. However, Chantal doesn’t make things as easy for her husband as I do for my wife.

  I love Sam infinitely. He’s the miracle of the lack of love between Mar
ie-France and myself, and occasionally when she comes home exhausted and relaxed from their tryst, reeking of white wine, Claude’s aftershave, and freshly laundered hotel bed linen, I quietly get out of bed and watch Sam sleeping.

  So this is the meaning of life.

  For the first time I understand men who don’t leave their families, even when they’ve fallen out of love with their wives. It’s because of these little people. These pure little people. Loving them is so simple and incurable.

  Sam’s extremely sensitive to the outside world, for his only means of resistance to it are wailing, sleeping, or crawling away. I watch his tiny head swivel when he hears a pleasant voice or sound, but he turns away when he detects a tone of voice that he doesn’t like. He can hear lies, for example, and exaggeration and grief. He finds them practically unbearable, and so he cries.

  Being with Sam seems to improve my perception of the world. He also reacts to spaces and places. We mustn’t walk along certain streets, and he once had a fit of crying outside the entrance to a building. I later discovered that someone had been mugged and killed there.

  He’s my little seismograph of invisible worlds. He observes me and everything else around him with an outlandish, almost primeval sensitivity. He’s capable of perceiving the fifth dimension of reality so many modern people cannot see in our digital age.

  The fifth dimension was the name given to it by a spirit investigator who had had a first career as a physicist and biologist and now, in his second life, was conducting research into the irrational. “The sphere between heaven and earth. You know, strange coincidences. Somebody dies and a child is born. You’re thinking about a friend you last saw thirty years ago when the phone rings and he’s on the line. Odd sensations that take hold of you in a ruined building or when you drive through countryside that was once plagued by war. The coast of Normandy still has a bloody pall over it. Have you ever been there?”

  Yes, I did go once, with Malo and Yvan, and what the man said is true: the sky was more gray, the grass more tired, and the centuries-old houses seemed lower and sadder than elsewhere. The land lay defeated on all sides. At the time I thought the fault lay with me and attributed it to my knowledge of the tens of thousands of people who had died there, not to the fact that the land had its own memory. A bloody pall.

  The spirit investigator explained that there were many things that people could not perceive through reason or with their limited senses tamed by civilization, either because they aren’t physically or mentally capable of it, or because they no longer want to do so.

  “Children, dogs, and cats see and sense things whose existence we deny. Growing up doesn’t always make you smarter. It usually makes you more stupid.”

  My son, on the other hand, can still see all these things. His senses have thousands more eyes and ears than mine or, presumably, anyone else’s. A funny thing happened one day. He pointed to a corner and said, “Grandpa! Grandpa!” He could have meant either Malo or Yvan. I couldn’t see anything, but Sam started laughing and giggling. Can he see my father or grandfather? Can children see the dead?

  One day in May, when I’m trying to teach Sam to count, repeatedly attempting to represent the number four—four fingers, four shoes, four blades of grass—he shouts out, loud and clear, “Yellow.”

  “No, Sam. Four—not yellow.”

  He shakes his little head, taps my fingers, and repeats forcefully, “Yellow.” He points to the list of numbers I’ve drawn with a long twig in the sand by the side of the Bassin de la Villette, not far from some old men playing pétanque. Then Sam points to the eight and says, “Gleen,” his word for green, and to the five and says, “Plue.” The six is red, the seven light green, the three bluish-yellow, and the two gray-red. He doesn’t like the figure one at all.

  “Aha. So what is yellow plus yellow?”

  “Gleen,” he answers straightaway, pointing to the figure eight. He loves eights. He loves dark green.

  All that day we play the “numbers are colors” game, and by that evening, I’ve realized that not only does my son see numbers in color, but he also assigns sounds to colors and numbers, or characteristics such as friendliness or strength or nastiness. The sound of an Underground train arriving in a station—“wy-elv,” meaning “white eleven”—or of your blood pounding inside your head when you put your hands over your ears—“Plue-dweam, Daddy!,” meaning a blue dream. I also know that Sam assigns colors to the emotions he detects in other people. Objects too, although he cannot tell me which objects. He points to shadows and puddles, and I reckon I’d be happy to spend my entire life learning his language.

  He’s very pale and quiet as we walk across the Place de la Bastille, clutching my hand and trundling along on his little chubby legs. I can feel the sun’s warmth on my back.

  “It’s red and white here,” says Sam, although he doesn’t just say it, he gestures at walls and columns that have stood for a hundred years or more. “Ow, loud!” he says, his wise old eyes filling with tears.

  That’s the day I finally begin to understand him properly. My son has more sensory receptors than other people, and so he suffers a constant bombardment of impressions that normal people don’t even notice on the edges of their perception. He’s a synesthete. I decide to break the news to Marie-France as gently as possible. However, Sam’s going to need a lot of courage and determination to cope with this gift and this “extra world.”

  I search for a route home that I’m pretty sure doesn’t take us past too many corners, squares, and windowsills where attacks, murders, riots, suicides, or lynchings have taken place. Along the way, I buy Sam a large salted-butter caramel ice cream of the kind we used to eat back home in Finistère, at the tip of Brittany. As he licks at it, I promise him and myself that I’ll do everything I can to help him to survive in this extra world.

  I’m overwhelmed with a feeling of such tenderness for my son that I have to bite the inside of my cheek. It hurts, but at least it stops me from bursting into tears.

  All of a sudden Sam peers at me and says, “Daddy ouch?”

  I nod. Daddy ouch, but a good kind of ouch.

  I don’t get around to telling Marie-France. Sam and I are waiting for the metro, and as the “wy-elv” sound approaches, so does the sad, drunken accordion player. He trips over a strap dangling from his instrument and barges into me with his shoulder, knocking me off balance and tearing my hand from Sam’s. I fall onto the tracks directly in front of the oncoming train.

  Not yet! Please! It’s too…

  Henri

  I tumble out of the moving jeep and cover Marie-France’s body with mine, shielding her head with my hands. The jeep rolls forward a few yards and crashes into a wall. Nelson, our driver, slumps forward over the steering wheel. He dies on the edge of the road through Wau in the Bahr el-Ghazal region.

  The boy with the machine gun is young, perhaps thirteen, but his eyes are as old as death. I’ve seen many of these old, tired children. Too many. We stare at each other until he lowers his gaze and lets the rifle slip from his thin fingers, as if he’s awfully tired of always doing the same thing, killing and more killing and yet more killing. It must be hell to keep living the same life over and over again, repeating every hour, every mistake, every wasted moment.

  Marie-France rolls into a ball behind the jeep. I see her grab her green camera bag. Ever the pro, I think, even now.

  The heat flickers before my eyes, and for a moment I think I know how the picture is going to turn out. For a further second I also know that Marie-France will sit alongside the editor in chief at the light table, going through the slides and contact sheets. Their bodies will touch and negotiate something. At the end of these negotiations, after a few weeks and glances, the two of them will be naked, moaning and writhing around inside each other. Years later, there will be more tears.

  I see all this in the blink of an eye. My eye
s are running, my head’s throbbing, and I feel an insatiable thirst.

  One of the company doctors to whom my editor in chief Gregory sent me told me that I had no more room in my brain. It was crammed with images, hyperrealistic footage and polytraumatic emotions that I’d absorbed over the years as if I were a sheet of blotting paper. They’d never been processed, “in therapy, for example, Mr. Skinner.” But can therapy ever drive the war from your mind?

  I crouch beside the boy as the shadows shift and Marie-France takes photographs. The murderous boy tells me that his father used to call him Akol. His father is dead, so are his mother and younger sister, but his elder sister is alive, for now, cooking for the commanders.

  “Nahia,” I whisper, and he nods. Only I realize that Akol hasn’t mentioned his sister’s name. How then do I know it? What is this? What’s going on? I’ve got malaria, I think. I’m hallucinating. I’m going to die. Am I going to die?

  Reality topples over the edge. Boy and Nahia and Nelson’s blood dripping onto the car seat, onto his shattered cowrie necklace. And Marie-France, who will sleep with her boss one day.

  I’m dying and I feel a sense of bitterness that there are so, so many things I haven’t done.

  Akol jumps to his feet and runs away. The rifle lies where it fell.

  We walk back to the camp. Marie-France gives me her protective vest with a label saying “Press” on it, but she carries her bag herself.

  “I can’t do this anymore,” she says at one point. “I don’t think I can take a picture of anyone ever again.”

  That night on the camp bed lit by two thin candles I take a swig of whiskey and pass the bottle to Marie-France. I keep passing it to her, again and again, as if it were milk to help her sleep.

  “I want to make love one more time before I die,” she says. Her consonants are slurred.

  “You will,” I reply, thinking of her boss Claude, whom I’ve never met.