to ask herself why.
Could there be something she was trying to repress?
If only she could have set aside all censorship, she might have slid into a
waking dream. A bit scary, she thought.
The more she relaxed and opened herself to random thoughts and images, the
more she felt as if she was in the major’s cabin by the little lake in the woods.
What could Alberto be planning? Of course, it was Hilde’s father planning that
Alberto was planning something. Did he already know what Alberto would do?
Perhaps he was trying to give himself free rein, so that whatever happened in the end
would come as a surprise to him too.
There were not many pages left now. Should she take a peek at the last page?
No, that would be cheating. And besides, Hilde was convinced that it was far from de-
cided what was to happen on the last page.
Wasn’t that a curious thought? The ring binder was right here and her father
could not possibly get back in time to add anything to it. Not unless Alberto did
something on his own. A surprise ...
Hilde had a few surprises up her own sleeve, in any case. Her father did not
control her. But was she in full control of herself?
What was consciousness? Wasn’t it one of the greatest riddles of the universe?
What was memory? What made us “remember” everything we had seen and experi-
enced?
What kind of mechanism made us create fabulous dreams night after night?
She closed her eyes from time to time. Then she opened them and stared at the
ceiling again. At last she forgot to open them.
She was asleep.
When the raucous scream of a seagull woke her, Hilde got out of bed. As usual,
she crossed the room to the window and stood looking out across the bay. It had
gotten to be a habit, summer and winter.
As she stood there, she suddenly felt a myriad of colors exploding in her head.
She remembered what she had dreamt. But it felt like more than an ordinary dream,
with its vivid colors and shapes ...
She had dreamt that her father came home from Lebanon, and the whole dream
was an extension of Sophie’s dream when she found the gold crucifix on the dock.
Hilde was sitting on the edge of the dock—exactly as in Sophie’s dream. Then
she heard a very soft voice whispering, “My name is Sophie!” Hilde had stayed where
she was, sitting very still, trying to hear where the voice was coming from. It
continued, an almost inaudible rustling, as if an insect were speaking to her: “You
must be both deaf and blind!” Just then her father had come into the garden in his UN
uniform. “Hilde!” he shouted. Hilde ran up to him and threw her arms around his
neck. That’s where the dream ended.
She remembered some lines of a poem by Arnulf 0verland:
Wakened one night by a curious dream
and a voice that seemed to be speaking to me
like a far-off subterranean stream,
I rose and asked: What do you want of me?
She was still standing at the window when her mother came in.
“Hi there! Are you already awake?”
“I’m not sure...”
“I’ll be home around four, as usual.”