All the branches point to the southeast. They strain and stretch, long and sinewy and horizontal in their flight from the wind. In winter, when the light disappears in the middle of the day and the branches are black and barren, they look like old, twisted witch’s fingers grabbing at an eastern wind that won’t be caught. In autumn, when the leaves are dry but have still not let go, they are wriggling tentacles, rattling snakes straining to break free of the firm hold of the trunk. In summer, when they bulge in green abundance and hum with birdsong and the murmur of insects, they are a lush, cooling bunch of self-enclosed, mystical life. And in spring, just before they burst into leaf, when they can but don’t want to but must, they are pure longing, outstretched hands, refusal and will at one and the same impossible time.
Trees are bearers of big, ancient secrets, Gabriel. One should honour them as one honours the oldest and the very young, for without them one becomes rootless.
WHEN I SPEAK TO YOU about nature in this way, as though it had human feelings and thoughts, it’s called anthropomorphism. Many think that anthropomorphism is inappropriate and should be avoided when one talks about nature, and in principle you would have agreed completely, for you don’t like the mixing-together of things that don’t belong together. But, in the case of our weather and our landscape, other rules apply. They are so intimately related to us that we easily forget ourselves and fall into conversation with them. It would seem strange to write to you about the nature around us as though it were not full of properties, and I think it would seem strange for you to read. We would both find it duller and less sociable than the one we deal with daily — less believable, almost.
Once, during a lengthy stay in hospital, you got tired of sitting in the ward all the time and announced that you wanted to go for a walk. Do you remember? It was windy and rainy, and the staff were resisting, but you insisted with an indisputable argument:
— But don’t you see, I’m a child of nature?
And then the two of us went out into the rain, walked down to the pond, and fed the ducks and talked to them for a while.
THERE IS A CONNECTION between all things, Gabriel.
On the night you were born, February snow fell heavy over Oslo. It was six months before we moved out to the sea. Your mother, my Henni, had had a difficult pregnancy. You were her fourth, and the anticipation of at last meeting you was all the greater because we hoped that the birth would release not only you, but her too, from physical distress and worry.
As she lay in the delivery room and it was a matter of minutes rather than hours, the birth had been induced, I was called away. There was a telephone call for me in the duty room. At the other end, from another world in the west of the country,I was told that your great-grandmother had passed away. Granny was dead.
I returned to the birth and could not say anything. Henni lay there surrounded by help but was alone in performing the miracle, in giving you life. When the midwife at last lifted you up and you opened your eyes and fixed them on me, limbs flailing as though you wanted to be nailed to life before you collapsed in weary exhaustion, it occurred to me that Granny was not dead in the irreplaceable sense of the word. She had, because her time was up and yours had come, yielded her place.
Only later, as we lay with your small, tired body between us on a waterbed in an adjoining room, did I tell your mother that her grandmother was gone, and we wept together. But the tears were not all bad. I think we both thought that one cannot always keep and at the same time get. It was a fine thought, strange and difficult.
Afterwards, as I wandered high on your birth through the fresh snow in the still of the Oslo night on my way home to your brothers and sister, I swear I saw a shooting star flash as Granny’s soul set out toward that heaven she had always believed in so strongly and unshakeably and trustingly.
When you were six or seven years old and we told you about that night, about how your great-grandma died at the same time as you were born, you questioned us about her voice and her eyes. That’s often your way of judging people, by listening to the timbre and pitch of their voice, by reading intentions and emotions in their looks. They can be angry, mean, or nice, and now you wanted to know if Granny had a nice voice and kind eyes. We told you as best we could about a wise woman with good hands and the very best pancakes. You reacted as so often before by asking for an expanded reply that would enable this new information to be incorporated into your own context, because it seems that you can only relate in a meaningful way to people you are able to regard as contributors or participants in your own life. Sometimes it’s as though the others are little more to you than passing incidentals in the general distracting hubbub of life.
— Can Great-Grandma see that I feel like crying when I think about her? Will I get to meet her when I’m an old man and die and go to heaven? Even though I know that’s a long time off?
The question was typical of you: despite the fact that it could only take place in the beyond, and a long time from now, you needed to establish a relationship on your own premises, within your own context, otherwise you would have had problems in distinguishing Granny from the rest of the hubbub.
We answered yes to your question, though we’ve no idea whether there is a heaven that welcomes the dead. We answered yes, because sometimes it’s more important to preserve contexts than to tell the truth.
THE BEST WAY OF PRESERVING contexts is by remembering things that want to be remembered by us. That might seem a strange way to express it, but all I’m trying to say is that we select carefully the memories we store. Whether we make the selection ourselves, or whether it happens of itself as we encounter the world, isn’t easy to say. Whatever, we cannot remember everything that is true, exactly what words were spoken, which shade of green the grass was in May. That is to ask for an impossible security. On the other hand, we can take memory cables and connect them to ourselves across dim chasms of time, and we can build bridges across great reaches of old, unknowable time by imagining the world as it offers itself to our memory. That way we ourselves can also be remembered, be incorporated by others into a sequence that is meaningful. The truth is intractable; it makes brutal sense like ice and steel, not soothing sense like contexts do, even though they may be untrue. Think of the tree in our garden — it carries not truth but stories of who you were when you climbed up and hid yourself in it, carved your name in it, dreamt of silver and golden treasures under it. The tree’s roots are like channels through which your stories filter into other trees, other names, other stories. I imagine the trees holding the world together, Gabriel, holding it in an underground grip, a lattice of rooted fingers, and remembering for us. If you press your ear to the ground you can almost hear the stories murmuring in a chorus that obliterates yours and mine and sweeps us into all the others.
This is hard for you. For you, contexts can and must only be true, because you confuse them with logical structures, chains of cause and effect in which each link is unambiguous and inviolate. You have no faith in thoughts that develop from a flimsy base of possibilities, not even likelihoods. You dislike experiencing a mental progression that takes place in uncertainty, and you guard against building your own sense of belonging on the unreliable sense of belonging of others. Is that why you so often stand alone in a corner and reach out as though in longing toward the play of others, toward lightness of heart, but without taking part? Does it hurt so much to let go?
And yet no one has taught me better than you that there is a connection between all things.
You, apparently the least suitable of teachers. You who cannot, who dare not what the rest of us find exciting and challenging and demanding, all that is abrupt and sudden and unexpected, all that is breakup and change and transformation. You who even dislike surprises at home, at least when they’re something other than presents, or news that we’re going to do something we’ve done before that you know you like, and even then there had bette
r be advance warning and plenty of time to prepare. Only such things as experience has accustomed you to — that you can expect small presents whenever Mom or Dad comes home from a trip away, that broken things can be repaired or replaced, that stains can be washed out and wet clothes dried — only the unusual that has become usual because you’ve seen it happen so many times can you accept and appreciate without thorough preparation.
But most things in life are unusual, Gabriel, most things happen for the first time. Will you ever manage to come to terms with this?
MANY YEARS AGO, long before you were born, I took a parachuting course and was due to make my second jump. Mom was away at work or studying, and I had your sister with me. She must have been three or four years old. She watched wide-eyed as I stood in the enormous hangar and packed the parachute, guided by the more experienced jumpers, put it on, and was inspected by the instructors. I had arranged to have a woman at the jumping centre look after Victoria while I was in the air, and the three of us went out onto the runway.
I travelled a lot in those days, and Victoria often came along when Mom drove me to the airport. For your sister, there was an evident connection between accompanying Dad to a place where he boarded a plane, and the experience of him being away for several days, if not weeks. A long, long time in a little girl’s world.
On this occasion she didn’t have Mom there to comfort her when I left, only a kind but strange woman to whom I had entrusted her, holding her by the hand. When she realized that Dad had not only packed a weird backpack and dressed up in strange clothes, but that he was also going to board the waiting plane, that in other words he was leaving her, perhaps to stay away for a long, long time, and that she was going to be left behind with this woman whom she didn’t know, she began to cry. On my way up the steps into the plane I turned and saw the silent despair in her eyes. It cut straight to my heart, so that I completely forgot to be afraid of the unnatural and unreasonable thing I was about to do — of my own free will throw myself out of a plane that was in perfectly good condition, several thousand metres up in the air.
It was probably only because fear had been displaced by a stronger impulse to comfort and hold my little Victoria, but I managed to guide the parachute almost directly down onto the marked landing site. Your sister stood there, obediently staring up into the air, following the minder’s pointing finger. When she caught sight of me, when she saw that it was Dad, the one who had just disappeared into a plane to leave her, a light that I will never forget spread across her face. First naked disbelief, then pure shining happiness.
In the years that have passed since you came to us, I have many times thanked God it wasn’t you who was with me that day. Had you been the child I suddenly abandoned in the care of a strange woman, only to reappear so suddenly and unexpectedly from the sky, you would have plummeted into a deep and painful crisis. It would have been impossible for you to adapt, to accept such a gross breach of your deep-seated need for contexts, for predictabilities, for time to grow accustomed — for things to be, as you put it, the way they usually are.
When you were the same age as Victoria was that day on the runway, Gabriel, it was even difficult for you to accept that you were served spaghetti for dinner instead of the meatballs we had talked about at breakfast. Even though you liked spaghetti a lot better.
YOU WHO HAVE TAUGHT me about contexts — not just how they simplify and make life easier and more comprehensible, but also how they add a reliability to life, a unique, rhythmic beauty that is the very foundation of long-lasting love — you are also more than any other the one who has astonished me.
Time after time I have thought: Good God, he’s going to do it, he’s breaking his own rules, he’s daring to do the unplanned, the unprepared, he’s deliberately seeking out that which is not as it usually is.
I’m not referring to occasions when you don’t understand social rules and conventions, like the time you stood behind me in the supermarket queue desperate to pass water, and were hurt and ashamed when I turned on you with anger in my voice because you had dropped your trousers to your ankles and stood there urinating in neat circles across the chocolate display. Or the time you walked out of the electrical goods store with Mom, your hands behind your back. She wondered why, and you proudly produced a portable Cd player, exclaiming, when you saw her eyes darkening:
— Yes, but no one saw anything!
No, no one saw anything, Gabriel, but then neither had anyone explained to you that stealing is wrong even when no one sees you. You know quite well that you’ve done something you shouldn’t have when someone finds out about it; but actions that are not discovered and reacted to, actions that go unseen, you somehow don’t recognize as being fully real. Not even when they are good: I often suspect that you do not know, until someone tells you, that you’ve been kind or clever. It is often said of people like you that they live in their own, closed world, but that isn’t quite true. To an even greater degree than others, perhaps, you discover yourself only in interaction. Without all the rest of us to reflect your actions and your individuality, you are alone in the loneliest sense of the word.
No, I don’t mean these or any of a hundred other situations. We gave up dwelling on such scenes a long time ago. Mom and I have since ceased to worry about scowling recriminations, vociferous complaints, rude accusations, nasty remarks . . . about how ill-mannered you are, how impolite, what bad parents we must be . . . poor child, imagine having a mother like that . . . isn’t it terrible the way some fathers neglect their children . . . but, my dears, shouldn’t he be in an institution?
Only on those occasions when bigger boys or adults let their ignorance affect you directly, on those rare occasions when they dare to hit you, or curse and threaten you, only then do I react, explosively, in furious outbursts that make most people back off. Then I feel, with an almost joyous fright, that I become dangerous, that I could hit, damage, and hurt. But most often we laugh it off, Mom and I, over a glass of wine in the evening. Over the years we have seen and heard so much insult, so many prejudices and ignorant remarks, that we’ve developed a kind of automated emotional response that enables us to transform them into good, funny stories.
And sometimes you are so pricelessly inappropriate that the laughter comes bubbling up by itself. On the way home from our holiday in Thailand, for example. It was late at night, and you staggered, drunk with sleeplessness and nausea, on board the Amsterdam plane, curly-haired, tanned, and beautiful as a little god, with your handpicked coconuts dangling from your fingers and a necklace of mauve orchids around your neck. We were on our way toward seat number forty-something at the rear of the plane when you came to a halt in the first-class cabin, looked around, caught sight of a glamorous model swathed in silk and sable two rows away, then resolutely marched over to her and vomited fourteen days’ worth of ice cream, fizzy drinks, and fried rice all over her furs and Armani and bleached hair. A tactful and efficient air hostess sorted the situation out and you slept in my lap back there on seat 48f, and I stroked your head and thought Bravo! and laughed all the way to Europe.
BUT I DON’T MEAN any of this when I say you astonish me. Stories like these, which can be funny and sad, even both at the same time, are not about astonishment, about the enigmatic contexts that make you so different that science has found it necessary to make up new words for them.
CHAPTER THREE
— Is it true that God lives in heaven?
— Why does no one know God? After all, God knows all people. Has anyone ever seen God?
— God doesn’t exist. He died a very long time ago. He died on a cross. Before that, God lived.
— Oh yes, God exists, I forgot, he came alive again. He didn’t disappear and vanish forever.
— God must really be magic if he can make people appear on the earth. Otherwise how could he do it?
— No, God isn’t magic. God
isn’t a human being at all. You once told me that.
— But how could God have been born into the world when he was the one who made it? Wait, no, that’s it, it was Jesus who was born. But aren’t Jesus and God the same?
YOU ASK AND YOU ASK, Gabriel, but God, Jesus, and heaven aren’t things I know much about.
It’s not surprising that you should want to know. At school they tell you stories from the Bible, you’re taken along to church on various occasions, and many of the people who live in the area around us have a strong faith in God that can’t help but influence you.
Whatever I’ve said to you when you ask, I’ve said carefully, because questions like these have to be approached with caution. They are difficult for all of us, and they are full of sinister verbal traps. It’s never easy to know what people mean when they talk about God and heaven. They might mean it literally, that an old man with a white beard lives up there and that he once spent six days creating the world. They might also mean it metaphorically, that God is an idea, something that exists only in our heads. For you who are so infinitely literal in your understanding and interpretation of the world, it must be an almost insurmountable trial to keep check of such multifarious concepts for which you have no tangible frame of reference.
You have an impressively large vocabulary, which you employ with exquisite precision. But in your sentences everything has to have its ordained and regular place, because you are dependent on words having and imparting a single, clear, and unambiguous meaning. You’ll only smile condescendingly if, for example, we ask you to “hold your horses,” or explain that in order to make bread you have to “knead” the dough. And if someone asks you, when it is obvious that your hair is a little shorter, if you’ve cut your hair, you answer with friendly exasperation:
— No, I haven’t cut my hair. I’ve been to the barber’s.
There are certain expressions you’ve learned to accept, even though you probably think of them as being woefully imprecise. I remember well when you were smaller and I asked you, for example, if you could pass me the milk. “Yes,” you said, but without doing anything with the milk carton, because to your ears all I had done was ask if you were capable of passing it to me.
Somewhere Over the Sea Page 2
