Chapter 102
I have vague memories of the rest of the trip. All is know is that I was falling in and out of sleep, and that I felt heavy headed and slightly nauseous whenever I was awake. I tried to keep my interactions with the outside minimal, to move as little as possible, to think as little as possible till I fell asleep again. I have a distinct recollection of a dream I had though. Strange how some details cling onto our memory and never fade.
I remember I was in a house, a very large one, with an antique flair to it. The house was Jack’s and mine, and yet it could have been in many ways one of those museum houses, where objects are arranged so that the visitor lives into the momentary delusion that the last owner never left, and that either one has leaped back into the past or that – for some metaphysical reason – the arms of the house’s clock have stopped ticking for few centuries. Although the house was mine I didn’t fully know it, and as I moved into the different rooms I was caught into a suspended feeling of discovery. Two rooms especially fascinated me, but in those two particular rooms I was not allowed to enter. I had hastily peeked into one of them standing at the door, and I had seen a light hanging from the ceiling, a huge light with metal circles intertwined, in between which an old electric bulb shed a dim circle of light around. Seeing my intention of getting into the room, Jack had said, “No Iris, you cannot come in here”. I had obediently backed up, although I couldn’t understand his rationale for not letting me in there. I had left with the acute wish to see further, but without daring to ask any questions. I believe this dream continued – in and out – throughout the intermittent islands of sleep against which my shipwrecked body sloshed during the flight to the land of my ancestors. At a point I recall wondering if this would be my last flight, and I thought about the coincidence that I would end my life trying to reach the place where my family had originated. A sign? But then I fell asleep again, and tried – over and again – to enter those rooms, each time stopping at Jack’s words. “No Iris, you cannot come in here”.
Then we landed and I woke up to a warm September day in Milan, where Mori was waiting for us at the airport.