I would like to write about a dream I had.

It began much like any of my dreams do: without a beginning. I do not remember how the dream began but I know that it had one because in my dream time still existed, and where there is time, there are beginnings.

I was in K—, my house in Poland where most of my father’s side of the family live. I was outside on the patio and looking out at the driveway in anticipation for someone to come. The day was sunny and the sky was clear, and no one was to be seen anywhere near. The house was quiet – a miracle in a house usually inhabited by three noisy children and three somewhat less noisy adults – and I was just standing there, waiting for God knows what. The air was warm – it must have been some time during the summer – and the door to the house was open, as was permitted by the adults of the house during the warmer days, although the flies it let in were not particularly appreciated.

I stood there waiting for some time when I decided that I would not continue waiting and would instead enter the house, and so I did, leaving the door open behind me. I was in our anteroom and both the door to our tiny toilet and our somewhat less tiny bathroom were closed. I entered, a bit hesitantly, the hallway connecting the dining room and one of the sitting rooms, and stood there for some time. I listened there in that hallway carefully, but my impaired hearing would not allow me any more information than my eyes had already provided – the world around me was completely silent, completely still.

I entered the dining room, which would usually be occupied by my warm grandmother, to find it empty. At this point I felt that something was not right, but to make myself sure I would have to complete the search of the house. I went in to my grandparents room, which is where my grandfather could be found sometimes, but this was not one of those times. My heart was already set on abandonment and the search was more to convince my mind, which still unsure, was already trying to piece together what was wrong. I entered the dining room again and crossed it to get back to the connecting hallway I had first come from, which took me to the first sitting room – once more empty – which in turn took me to the last sitting room, just as empty as the last.

I hadn’t the slightest clue was happening. “Where could they all be?” I thought to myself. No longer searching, I walked slowly back into the hallway and through it into the kitchen. I took a quick look outside the kitchen window, where I could see that the silence, not contained by the walls of the house, spilled out into the world surrounding it and froze every blade of grass, every leaf on every branch of every tree in the forest, as though all wind had been removed for the time that the humans were gone and placed elsewhere so that it could be put back once they returned – no one would miss the wind if they weren’t there to see it was missing, would they?

I was slowly approaching the kitchen window when a loud thump startled my dormant ears, making me realise that I hadn’t gone deaf, the world around me had simply taken a vow of silence. Startled by the thump that broke the vow I hadn’t thought to investigate where it came from, and all of a sudden I felt a sense of unease. I had a general idea of where the sound originated, and only when I was walking through the hallway to the first sitting room – where I thought the sound had come from – did a secondary thump remind me of the presence of the attic, which seemed to be where the secondary thump had come from. I could not find my voice, and instead decided to knock a few times on the kitchen table to try communicate with whatever was making the thumping sounds, assuming it could be communicated with. There was no reply, and after waiting a few seconds just to be sure, I continued to move slowly in the direction of the attic stairs. Whether or not the two thumps were connected by cause – for they certainly were connected by the fact that so far they were the only two pieces of evidence that I was not going deaf in this seemingly dead, abandoned world – I decided I had to investigate what this thump was, and perhaps make progress on what was happening in this derelict dreamscape.

The stairs to the attic were covered with jars containing different jams and pickled foods, as well as a carton of eggs and some milk, and as I was removing them another thump came from the attic. This third thump furthered the belief that all of the thumps were coming from the same place, since I still was not certain as to the nature of the first, startling thump. By this third thump I was more accustomed to listening in this mute world and I thought of what these thumps sounded like or reminded me of. They were clearly heavy, perhaps like sacks of grain or some other substance, but they were making sound at intervals that made me believe some person was behind them; the spacing between each thump was too long for them to be falling from some place – not like the attic was big enough for things to be falling so loudly anyway – and since everything else but me seemed static, perhaps it was the humans, not physics, that gave this deranged world its motion.

I was finished clearing the jars from the attic stairs and started climbing up them as a sudden sense of dread began filling my body, as if this was something I had done before and never wanted to do again, and although my mind did not understand it, my muscles were determined not to follow through with the rest of this investigation. I took a few steps down the stairs which seemed to please my body, which still did not want to go ahead, but I felt that there was something in that attic that needed my attention, and that I would persevere and discover exactly what it was.

With some more determination than before, I recovered my previous position on the stairs and advanced a few further, allowing me to reach the panel that blocked off the attic from the rest of the house. I lifted the panel, set it aside, and travelled up the remaining stairs. The entrance was too high to simply put my head and look through: I would have to lift myself up there to see anything that was happening. With relative uncertainty and that dreaded feeling, which no longer took over my entire body and now resided in my gut, I gripped above the entrance on both sides and braced to enter the unknown.

With a single motion I lifted myself into the attic and to my surprise, it was not dark at all, which allowed me to see the next surprising thing: it was completely devoid of any kind of life, and the glazing of dust on every box suggested it hadn’t been visited in the last few decades. I got up from my sitting position to get a better look around and make sure I wasn’t imagining things – I clearly must have been at that point, because either I was imagining the three thumps from before, or imagining that nothing had caused them – and I could see that the windows in the attic were no longer boarded up like they used to be, letting in the light that was now granting me the vision I needed to get to the bottom of this mystery.

I completed a rotation and was mesmerized by the sheer quantity of boxes our family had completed forgotten existed. Piles and piles of memories from times long passed contained in cardboard coffins of this wooden tomb, just waiting to be reanimated by the human touch of curiosity that makes us look back and reminisce old times. I was captivated by all of these fragments of humanity that lay before me; in a sense, these boxes were a part of the family which lived in this house; inanimate siblings of the minds so unfaithful to the past and always focussing on the present so as to be blind enough to leave them locked away in a vault, seemingly untouched for generations, abandoned like unloved orphans in the Sahara desert.

Then I saw something that made me require a closer look. I was clearly going to stay here for some time, and without the threat I had been senselessly fearing before, I decided to close the entrance to the attic so as not to fall out by accident when I was walking around. I walked over to what I had thought to be a photo album and only upon closer inspection realised to be an old recipe book of a bright red colour belonging to my great grandmother, who died before I had the privilege of knowing her. The book was bound in a soft leather and was coloured red all over with a yellow design of a stork on the front cover, which looked as though it had been woven into place by a meticulous and careful hand. I picked it up and only then did I realise that the dust on it remained, as though merging with the book, even when I tried clearing it off with my hand. I looked behind and me and indeed, I hadn’t disturbed any of the dust on the boxes I had to cross on my way over to this book, which was strange to me until I remember that the trees and grass were also motionless, according to some unknown rule of this mysterious dream world.

I opened the book, but it was empty. This surprised me in a way I didn’t think it would. So far so many unusual things had happened around me and were still happening, with motionless grass and dust and abandoned houses, that an empty book should be the last thing to surprise me as much as it did. I stood there and began to shiver, as the hollowness of the bright red recipe book seeped into my body through my fingertips and I dropped the book into its original cardboard container. The thick book made a loud thump as it hit the other contents of the box and I was somewhat happy that even in my state of fright my sense of hearing was still intact. I couldn’t explain the feelings that were going through me but I knew something was wrong, even if I couldn’t say why.

I looked around and nothing seemed any different than it had before, and after a few seconds I recovered from the sensation of horror that I was left with after opening the book and decided to look around a bit more in the attic. I took a few steps over some boxes, constantly checking that I wasn’t stepping on some antique artifacts from my family’s past, and once more found something that caught my eye like the red book had. Only a part of it was visible as it was lying under one of the boxes, so I grabbed the box at two sides and lifted it up in order to get a better look at what lay underneath it, but the box turned out to be much heavier than I expected and after lifting it a meter or so above the ground my poor grip slipped from it and I dropped it. The noise of the box hitting the attic floor once more broke the silence in the world and after I inspected it slightly better I saw that it had two handles on the side which I could grab and safely pick it up without a fear of dropping it again.

I took one handle in each hand and tensed my fists when I heard a sound coming from the outside of the house. It was a knocking of some sort, as though someone was at the front door of the house and was trying to get in, and without the consent of my brain my muscles quickly fell into panic mode. For seemingly no reason at all my body was certain that I had to get out of that attic, that I was in danger, that encountering that individual from in front of the house was exactly what I was trying to avoid this entire time.

I knew that I could not leave the way I came in, and my eyes jotted to the nearest window. I lifted my legs, and in my dreaming state like a spectator watched myself move over the piles of boxes as I approached the window that now became my planned escape route. My depth perception had failed me on one of the piles of boxes and I had caught my leg and tripped, but I quickly got up and got to the window. I opened it and stepped out on to the roof, which was slanted but still flat enough for me to maintain my balance on top. I closed the window so that the intruder, once he entered the house, would not know my escape path, and I made my way down the roof and made myself low enough to grab the ledge of the roof and lower myself gently to the patio without making any noise. Once here I looked through the open patio door to see if the intruder made his way inside already and noticed that the various items I had previously removed from the stairs were now back on them. Giving this little to no thought, I was ready to make my escape, when the thought that the intruder may still be outside the house struck me. I had no certainty of knowing that he definitely entered, and if I were to go now I would simply walk right into him, which was not what I wanted, and instead stood there, uncertain of what my next move should be, waiting for him to come out from the driveway of the house and greet me like some unwanted guest. 

In my moment of intense panic and confusion, an overwhelming sense of serenity took over me, and suddenly, I was completely calm. I stood there, on the patio, waiting for something, not entirely sure what, on a warm and sunny summer day at my house in K—, Poland.

27.IV.20