By: Gaspar Bartko
I had that dream again last night.
It was raining and I was sitting in a large old open-ended cardboard packing box. I had dragged it under the cover of a bridge to get away from the rain, but it offered little shelter. The downspout from a storm drain on the bridge deck above me channelled the downpour and sent it falling in a spraying veil around the box. It seemed to be raining harder than it really was. I couldn’t move out of the wet because I was paralyzed, staring trance-like over the sodden summer grass and scrub that grew on the small plain before me.
Everything was sopping wet: the sky, the ground, the cardboard box that enclosed me. Humidity penetrated everywhere, and I was like a passive sponge soaking it all in. My hair, once blond, platinum blond from summer sun when I was a small boy, was grey. It was matted and plastered to my skull from the dampness and slid its unwashed, greasy way down to my shoulders. Where it parted around my face it revealed skin that had the ashen, jaundiced pallor of the terminally ill.
I was wearing layers of shirts made of navy and green tartan flannel, pants of industrial polyester twill, and somebody else’s old shoes. My clothes were not fresh or new. Everything was pilled and torn and damp. I had scavenged them all from dumpsters and the reject piles at the back of a Goodwill store. The layers had moulded themselves to my form over the years. Time, sweat and accumulated filth had reinforced them making them surprisingly stiff and strong. They had become my armour and my prison: keeping others out and keeping me in.
I had no family to speak of. We had drifted apart. I hadn’t had contact with any relatives or friends in years. I just had vague and dim memories of what it was like to share someone else’s company. But a passing voice would sometimes penetrate the shifting layers of my consciousness and trigger a moment of clarity. A fleeting and vivid memory would become tantalizingly real: a particularly touching moment from my early childhood in Czechoslovakia where I spent the first eight years of my life.
It was a blistering day in mid August. I could feel the heat of the blazing summer sun trying to penetrate the cool shade of the immensely old and tired apricot tree under which I sat. The tree grew in the middle of my grandparents’ dirt back yard, and, as with all ancient things, it surprised everyone in that it managed to renew itself each spring, and bear sweet fruit each summer. I was facing away from the house under that comforting tree, as it shaded my impossibly blond head from the sun. I was hugging my legs tightly against my chest with my chin resting on my little-boy knees. My eyes were staring trance-like into the infinity of the potato fields that formed the outer boundaries of my universe.
My mother’s voice softly sang to me from far, far away.
“Gaško! Kde si?”
I heard her footsteps coming lightly, dustily near. Their dry, airy sound gradually drew me back to my childhood present, now past, the nearer she came. Closer and closer until, finally, she was beside me.
“Tu si moj mily.”
She knelt closely by and wrapped her arms around me. All was soft and warm. The sounds of the small world of my grandparents’ yard gradually came back to me while I was in her safe embrace: crickets chirping, hens clucking, the dog barking. But an eerie premonition dawned in my child’s eyes just before I reached full awareness. Half a world, and a life time away, the same awareness dawned in my homeless eyes.
“Mamka! Kde si?” I called out from the sodden box.
I heard no comforting response from the rainy gloom.
The future cried out to the present and I was zapped into consciousness with a sweat-drenched jolt.
“Mother! Where are you?”
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