Somewhere Over the Sea

by Halfdan Freihow

  You stand quite still, as though waiting. There are ten metres between you.

  Then he makes a tiny movement of the head, a fraction of a nod, hardly more than what follows from a wink. You remove your T-shirt, sandals, and cap, lay them to one side, and approach him along the rug. When only a couple of metres separate you, you slowly sink to your knees and bend your whole body forward, until your forehead touches the silk. There you lie in what seems to be pure, devoted submission.

  The slightly built monk turns slowly to one side, dips a long-handled brass bowl into a jar, and fills it with water. Then he lifts it, reaches out toward you, and splashes the water over your head and down your back, muttering and chanting something that can only be a blessing. You do not move a single muscle as the water touches you. You lie there, trusting, and knowing, with a knowledge that is closed to me.

  Afterwards you stand up, cast a quick glance at the monk, pick up your shirt, sandals, and cap, and ask if we can leave soon. The small, modest man has closed his eyes and is gone somewhere behind the foliage of illusion.

  Later that day we build a pyramid of sand on the beach, carefully carve out the steps, shape coiling dragons’ bodies with wet sand, and place your Buddha on top. I try to ask you about the monk, but your eyes tell me that you don’t want to or can’t answer.

  It’s already evening when it happens, just as you’re about to go to bed. All of a sudden you conjure up a furious anger. You rage and curse at that stupid monk who threw water on you. I don’t know what has happened; I only understand that the frail web of trust you two spun together earlier in the day has, for some reason or other, disappeared. In its place there is now only profound indignation and angry reproach.

  But ten months later, one evening at home by the bedside, you suddenly exclaim:

  — Oh, Dad, I love your dream!

  I don’t quite know what to say to this, and a long silence follows.

  Then you ask:

  — Dad, what exactly is your dream?

  — Well . . . to be good and kind, and help others, I reply rather vaguely, caught off guard.

  — So what’s your dream then, Gabriel?

  You think for a long time.

  — To be rich! In money and treasures, I mean. But also

  in love.

  I still don’t know what to say, and you lie looking up at the ceiling a while before you continue.

  — Because I’m actually just like a monk. Only I collect treasures and of course monks don’t. But otherwise I’m just like a monk. A Buddhist monk, I think.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Today I’ll have to bail out the boat after all. Not from any ­sudden manifestation of a sense of duty, but simply because the sun is shining. Out here by the sea most things have to give way when the sun shines, even our reluctance to perform practical tasks that should have been completed long ago.

  The sun is shining, despite the fact that it is October, and from the north a breeze blows, temperate and caressing. I don’t know where the clouds have gone to, but it doesn’t really matter, because they aren’t here. This morning, when you and Victoria and Mom left for school and work, the sky hung low in shades of grey, drying out after the night’s downpour. But over the last few hours it has retreated upward again, higher and higher, until the cloud cover lost its grip and had to find another and lower sky to attach itself to, perhaps over Bergen, that’s not my problem. Here, at any rate, the sun is shining as though that’s all it had ever done, you’ll be home in an hour and a half, and I must bail out the boat because we need it.

  Balder realizes at once what’s about to happen when I descend the steps to the cellar, find my wellington boots and pull on the green anorak. Balder’s father was a cocker spaniel, his mother a mixture of border collie and beagle, and you won’t find a better pedigree anywhere. You and he were born within a few months of each other and have grown up together, although as a dog he’s getting on a bit now. He’s black as night, has a good temperament, is loving and loyal, and I’ve no doubt at all that in his own quiet dog-mind he considers you his best friend. Balder’s only failing is as a watchdog: whether it’s me driving up or Victoria on her bicycle, he gives the same two or three half barks as he would if the house were surrounded by bloodthirsty terrorists. On the other hand — if we haven’t got any clothes

  on, we always manage to get dressed in time when Balder announces an approach.

  On the lawn outside the cellar door I stand still a moment. I often do. It’s not because the grass reminds me of yet another long-postponed task, but because this vantage point is the site of an early memory of you that gradually has become one of my saddest. You couldn’t have been more than six months old. We had just moved here from Oslo, it was an evening at the height of summer, and I stood out here on the lawn with you in my arms beside what was then the henhouse. Together we admired the view, as one contemplates a newly conquered kingdom: emerald-green pastures tumbled down toward the shore; the sea glinted in copper and amber and ruby red; islands were black velvet rimmed in gold, the horizon a treasure chest, and the sky an ineffable immensity of sapphire blue.

  Perhaps it was on a whim, but it felt like a certainty. I lifted your little hand in mine to point, turned in a slow, sweeping circle and said:

  — This is your home, this is yours, here is where you will live, Gabriel.

  At the time it seemed logical: your oldest brother, Kai Henrik, had already moved out before we left Oslo. He was about to find his own place in the world, and as the first-born he would inherit a building plot. Alexander, the next oldest, was so uncompromisingly headed into his teens and everything that didn’t have to do with a life in the country in the parental home that it seemed out of the question he might ever want to settle here. Victoria was aged seven and had already given every indication of having abilities and qualities that would take her far; she would be needing things very different than a house by the sea. That left only you, the last-born, to be raised by wind and sun, to grow into the landscape and one day take over. Or so I thought. It was a good thought, for it vaulted continuity over our little moment on the lawn, as the fairy-tale landscape shimmered everywhere around us.

  Three years later it was with a very different kind of certainty, a new and painful knowledge, a so-called “diagnosis,” that I had to picture your life here. A life to which you suddenly seemed condemned, a life you could not reject, nor were capable of rejecting. Since then few months have passed without you ­asking, with a kind of mantric need for confirmation:

  — Can you promise me, Dad, that I’ll always be able to

  live here?

  TODAY, HOWEVER, THE SUN shines from a spotless sky, and no doubt there’s a gale blowing in Oslo, but I don’t think about that, for I have a boat to bail out. Balder and I follow the track down to the boathouse, which is only used by the sheep and those of us who live here. Not only because of the weather, but on account of the sheep too, we will one day — in the fullness of time — have to fix the boathouse. In the summer they like to seek out the shade on the northerly side, but the paved path along the wall is so narrow that they’re forced to scour their rough wool against the woodwork, in a trade-off that removes flaking paint and leaves muck behind.

  The hell with it, I think as I round the corner and step onto the jetty. At least what it pleases us to call a jetty; it is possible, at high tide, to lie alongside there.

  The boat — which you like to call a ship, or a vessel, because who’s ever heard of pirates in a boat? — is a sorry sight. The water inside and the water outside are almost on a level. It takes all my strength to drag it close, and a talent for balance I don’t even know I have to keep my footing on the thwarts while I fill the sea, bucket by bucket, with fresh quantities of new water.

  It takes an hour, even though we’re talking about a fairly modest fourteen-foot sh
ip.

  I leave it to the sun to sip up the last drops and hardly dare to believe it when the motor makes a promising sound on the third attempt and starts on the sixth. Then I go ashore with a “No, not yet, Balder” to the tail-wagging enthusiast on the jetty, and fetch the blankets and foam mats and life jackets we’re going to need. Then I hurry up to the house, which you like to call a castle, or a fortress, because kings and princes don’t live in ordinary houses, do they?

  Victoria lies half asleep on the sofa in front of the television. She doesn’t want to come; she’s waiting for her boyfriend. Apparently the same one as yesterday and the day before, so it’s probably serious. Mom has a meeting straight after work and won’t be coming until later.

  In the fridge I find the chops I was hoping for, and even a bottle of white wine behind the vegetables. Into the cooler with them, along with the freezer elements, juice, a bar of chocolate, and the vanilla yogourt that was actually saved for school tomorrow. No need for water for Balder, he manages well enough with what he finds in puddles and cracks in the rocks. Into a plastic bag I put a roll of kitchen paper, cutlery, marinade, glasses, a corkscrew, paper plates, and two Thermoses, one with coffee and one with cocoa. I’m standing there thinking that the charcoal and the white spirit are in the shed when Balder announces an arrival. Through the kitchen window I can see that it is your taxi.

  I wouldn’t say a word against the council’s taxi service that makes sure you’re conveyed to and from school each day. It’s a generous service, I think, and not something I should take for granted. I also understand that the council has to save money, or that the council’s money has to be saved, or whatever. All the same, it gives me a little jab to the heart each day when the maxi-taxi drives up, mornings and afternoons. It’s cheaper this way, they say, and I understand that too, but I don’t like it, seeing you rounded up in the bus for pupils with special difficulties, along with multi-handicapped children who sit chained to their wheelchairs and are hardly able to communicate with their surroundings. Let them call it what they will — demanding, inappropriate pride — but I don’t like it, for I can’t help asking myself what you think. You rarely say anything, but do these daily drives in the company of those who are so much less endowed than you have any influence on your self-image? Are you gradually being driven to see yourself as you see them? Have you heard what the others at school call it, the spaz-taxi? Does that bother you? Do you find it hard and hurtful to talk about? One day they told us at school that you had pulled some poor girl’s hair and tried to tip her wheelchair over, because “she makes a mess when she eats and she can’t speak.” Was it your own hair you were pulling, Gabriel?

  But like I said: praise be to the council’s taxi service, we’d never have managed without it, and today the sun is shining and it’s a bright little lark of a boy who comes running to greet me.

  — Hi, Gabriel, how good to see you!

  I open my arms to receive you, but you have neither the time nor the capacity for such attention:

  — Yeah, yeah, I know, let’s not talk about it anymore. Do you know what Morten told me today?

  I don’t know who Morten is and answer only:

  — Morten at school? No, what did he say?

  — That I might, just might, get a genuine, a real genuine lump of gold from him! Isn’t that fantastic?

  You’re bubbling so much it’s difficult to get through to you.

  — Yes, that’s really fantastic. We’ll just have to wait and see what comes of it, because genuine gold lumps are very expensive, you know. But do you know what? Today . . .?

  And then I tell you what I’ve planned, sneak in fragments of sentences about boat trip and barbecuing and juice and chops every time you stop to draw your breath between identical-sounding repetitions of how fantastic it is that you might get a real genuine lump of gold from Morten.

  In the end we’re agreed: we’ll have to wait and see. Now let’s go to sea.

  THERE’S BOUND TO BE an optimal logistical order in which to do these things, but I’ve never found it.

  You and Balder both hop about impatiently on the edge of the jetty and want to get into the boat, but neither of you understands that you’re in the way — that I’ve got blankets and foam mattresses and cooler and plastic bag and charcoal to load, that there’s a bow I’ve got to hold close enough to the jetty to be able to reach out for all this between your legs, but not closer, otherwise it’ll get roughed up against the concrete, that there’s a life jacket I’ve got to help you into while doing the splits, with one foot on the edge of the jetty, the other on the bow, and a motor that for God’s sake mustn’t overchoke and flood, otherwise it’ll stop, and a flooded carburetor in an outboard motor is a nightmare.

  But everything works out fine. The gear and the dog are on board, the motor is ticking over nicely, all that remains is to fold out your blanket at the forward end of the boat, and then it’s your turn. I’ve cast off fore and aft and I’m holding on to the jetty with one hand and with the other helping you step aboard. You move one foot down into the boat, stand with the other still on the jetty, and then you stop. You stare out into space, as though rehearsing something, and then you turn to me and say, completely oblivious to our current situation, as though we were sitting in the living room and not halfway through a delicate manoeuvre between land and sea:

  — Dad, why is it actually so fantastic that I might get a lump of real gold from Morten?

  — Just get into the boat! I’ve no idea! Do as I tell you!

  It all comes out much harsher and dismissive than I intend or actually feel, but honestly.

  — Yes but, Dad, why . . .

  — Gabriel!

  This time my voice leaves no room for doubt. Fortunately, you take the hint, put your other foot on board and get yourself seated comfortably. I breathe a sigh of relief, let go of the edge of the jetty, hurry aft to the motor before the current drifts us into even shallower waters, throttle out into the sound, and am about to light a cigarette, which seems to me deserved.

  The grill! I’ve forgotten the grill for the barbecue! Not much use in charcoal and white spirit and chops without a grill. As far as I can recall, it’s in the shed.

  About face and in again. I explain to you what it is I’ve forgotten, that I must go up to the house to fetch the grill, and ask if you’re sure you can sit there quietly and wait for me.

  — Shall I bring some toys for you while I’m at it? Some treasures, maybe?

  I ask not only to be nice, but also because doing an errand for you gives a somewhat greater legitimacy to this annoying little extra trip. You explain in detail what you want and where you think it is, and promise not to go anywhere or get into trouble while I’m gone.

  I’m still irritated by my own forgetfulness as I stomp back up toward the house; but then for a moment I contemplate that it’s probably pouring down over in Arendal, and at once my mood is again as light as the sky above me. The grill is exactly where it ought to be, so too are, in a manner of speaking, your rock crystals, opals, amethysts, conches, and the silk blanket, even though it’s news to me that our washroom has been turned into a treasure chamber.

  Now let’s go to sea.

  IT IS, EVERY SINGLE TIME, a moment of truth.

  I can think of no better expression to describe the experience of being at sea with you, in our boat. It is a moment of beauty, a moment that asks to be looked in the eye. It is perhaps the most demanding and rewarding moment I know of.

  I sit at the back by the outboard motor. You sit in the front, always turned away from me, toward something else out there, as if you were scouting for land. I see your soles, which you rest on, your back, and I see your head, fair curls in the wind and the sharp light. You sit absolutely still. As long as the boat is moving you sit like this, motionless, your hands in your lap, fa
cing something I don’t know about. If we’re headed for a wave so big that I have to shout “Wave!” you raise your hands from your lap almost like a sleepwalker and fold them around the rubber trim on each side, but you don’t turn your head to see how we take the wave. When we’ve ridden it, you lay your hands back in place, in your lap. You don’t seem interested. There is something thoughtless even about the way you give Balder a pat, when he puts his forepaws up on the thwart and presses his snout in between your hands. Usually I tell myself that you seem secure. It cannot be anxiety, I imagine, that is the source of so much serenity. But sometimes I catch myself thinking that perhaps you’re hiding some unknown fear behind all this composure, and that’s a thought that fills me with a nameless dread I don’t know what to do with.

  I’ve never asked you what you’re thinking when you sit like that, turned away and averted. And you’ve never said anything. This mutual silence is a kind of agreement I am only reluctantly a party to, because at times it feels as though I’m losing you. You sit there, two or three short metres in front of me, but it’s as though you’ve left me a long time ago, as though you’re obeying orders from another and mightier captain, as though your ship has already brought you to a larger sea than I can reach with my little boat.

  Where are you now, Gabriel?

  I know your body so well, I see it clean through the jacket and trousers and vest, your skin and your muscle tissue, and I see that no quivers or tensions run through you. The blood flows effortlessly in your veins, your heart beats rhythmically and monotonously. You don’t seem caught up in any agitation; no nagging want has set your glands pumping. Is it only that you’re tuning in and tuning out? That the swell and the sea breeze soothe you? That you need this moment of leisure, that you’re just resting and enjoying? You always say yes when I ask, but you’re never the one who suggests a boat ride. Why not? I think. If it’s something you need?