I dreamt I was in Switzerland (a less logical and realistic setting than it may appear, since the semi-self-aware ‘I’ who was doing the dreaming was
Naked, then again sometimes fully clothed, I was being chased across a Tobleronish range of small, no more than knee-high, perfectly triangular mountains, the foothills of the infinite, by somebody or something whose contours I couldn’t at first make out with exactitude. The chase, moreover, was a very uneven one. For a while he, if he it were (but I gradually came to understand that my pursuer was indeed male), appeared to glide above the mountains in a sustained and seamless arc underneath a sky of tampons and rainbows, while I found myself obliged by my dream’s martinet of a
And he kept coming. Without even having to turn my head, I somehow knew that he was dressed in the garb – quilted anorak, its fur-lined hood reposing on his slightly stooped shoulders, old-fashioned khaki shorts and thick woollen stockings which nearly met those shorts halfway up his chubby legs – of a portly butterfly-hunter. In actual fact (if I can use that phrase about a dream), he wasn’t chasing me after all. Waving his long-stemmed net every which way, he was endeavouring to nab a colony of butterflies that waltzed insouciantly around his head as though dangled on as many strings. And it was only when he was about to overtake me that I realised that the butterflies weren’t butterflies at all but books, open books, their pages fluttering in the wind-machine breeze. I could even read their titles, about most of which, however, there seemed to me something not quite right.
At that same instant, as Rossini’s overture swelled on the soundtrack and the shadow of my pursuer’s net cast its own net over me, he morphed into the Lone Ranger. Wearing a black sleeping-mask just like mine, brandishing in his right hand the butterfly-net with the captured and still vainly fluttering book inside it, the book which bore my name, digging a bejewelled spur into his horse’s tender haunch so that it reared up on its two hind legs, he cried out, ‘Hi-Yo, Silver!’ Then, accompanied by his faithful pard Tonto (now where had he sprung from?), he galloped away on thundering hoofbeats into the thrilling days of yesteryear and I awoke.
When I consulted my wristwatch, I was shocked to discover that it was twenty-five past eleven and that, oversleeping as I had, I risked missing altogether the Mayor’s reception which would already be well underway. I leapt out of bed, raced into the bathroom and, twelve minutes later, a personal record, had shaved, showered and dressed. Breakfast was no longer being served in the dining room, nor would I have had time to consume it even if it were, and my hope was that coffee as well as alcohol would be available at the Kunsthalle.
I rushed downstairs, through the lobby and out into the car park. Ignoring the appeals of my palpitating heart to take it easy, I ran straight to the Kunsthalle building, which I made out ahead of me every step of the way but which still felt unpleasantly distant for one as out-of-shape as I was.
As I drew closer, I saw a crowd of people with glasses of champagne in their hands, some I knew, others not, milling about on its front steps. I recognised Sanary, his blazer a black blot among so many pastel shades, and the ubiquitous Evie, and I heard a loud drawl – ‘I tell you, he’s ghaarstly, he’s perfectly ghaarstly!’ – which told me that Meredith too was of the company. A minute later I myself was among them.
‘What’s happened?’ I breathily asked.
As I might have foreseen, Evie was the first to reply.
‘It’s Slavorigin.’
‘What about him?’
‘He’s disappeared.’
‘Disappeared? What do you mean, disappeared?’
