Somewhere Over the Sea

by Halfdan Freihow

  Are you okay, Gabriel?

  You’re so beautiful and dignified sitting there, somehow so very unattainable. Sometimes I can’t stand it and I call your name out loud, above the headwind and the roar of the motor, to get you to look at me a moment. You turn, deliberately, as though you knew. I lay a kiss on the palm of my hand and blow it to you, mouth “I love you” with my lips and drink in your face with my eyes. You mime a sort of response, but your kiss lands in the water, for you don’t have time to follow it all the way; you’ve already turned back to what is yours alone out there ahead.

  Are you alone now?

  No, you can’t be. You are wholly and completely present in the landscape surrounding us, and I shrug off this melancholy that doesn’t belong here where regret and longing have no place, here where there’s so much space that even grief and joy become small and confused. I see how the open, exposed surroundings suit you, how you seamlessly fit yourself into the landscape, how it’s yours. And I see how this context is also ours — father and son and dog on board a boat on its way out to sea. There’s something timeless about this scene, something almost archetypal, which makes it profoundly reconciliatory.

  THE LINE OF SKERRIES outside our island isn’t very long, but in compensation the good Lord has taken great pains with it. Even with only four weary horsepowers at our disposal we are within reach of bay, cliffs, islets, and points for every occasion, every prevailing wind, every angle of sunshine. But since the wind out here often blows from the north, and the sun is in the south during the daytime, we’ve developed the habit of choosing the smooth slopes of a little island some fifteen minutes away sailing southwest. At the back is a bluff that provides shelter from the wind, and in front it stretches out hungrily toward the open sea in the south.

  That’s where we’re heading now. Apart from a couple of fishing boats there isn’t a vessel in sight and therefore no people either. It’s the way things usually are: as well as being paradisal — or perhaps precisely for that reason — the islands are blessedly free of people. At least those who haunt other coastlines with their noise, their engine power, and their incomprehensible haste.

  On days like this the smooth rocky slopes are a dream, but they’re no place to be when the wind suddenly turns and, for the sake of variety — or to spite the meteorologists — sends in storm troopers from the south. Then the waves bite their way onto the rocks in great mouthfuls and toss the boat ashore, and the wind whips away everything that isn’t bolted down or held fast. Then the main force arrives, a black wall of sky that first appears low on the horizon and, before we’ve had time to ask each other if this can be true, it is towering above us in biblical dimensions and hurling down its heaviest ammunition.

  Ha! I think, and picture to myself scenes of soaked discontent in charming Lillesand. For here the sun is beaming in the middle of October itself, and the sea splashes and smiles, and the wind is so apathetic it scarcely raises a flap.

  THE BOAT IS MOORED, equipment and provisions carried ashore. Balder has caught the scent of something and is away over the hills. I busy myself with blankets and food, restore the little barbecue pit that wind, water, or vandals have ruined since our last visit. You stand there and watch in almost complete silence. I get undressed. The heat is Mediterranean and the body needs to store sunlight before the night of winter comes to claim us. I make myself comfortable on the blanket, light a cigarette and pour a glass of wine. I ask if you’re hungry. I’ll start the food shortly, just want to sit a little first and enjoy the sun. Do you want a glass of juice?

  Each time I say, almost word for word, the same things. They’re obvious things, but they have a liberating effect on you. You look around as though inspecting the site and you don’t find anything that is incomplete or unusual, anything that isn’t the way it usually is and therefore shouldn’t be. You reply either “Yes please,” or “No, I’ll wait till later.” And just that, simply the fact that you feel free and secure enough to choose your own answer, to follow your own inclination, to decide about your own thirst, tells me that you are ready. You are done with occupying the site, done with clearing it, accepting its restrictions and possibilities. Now you are here and could, if I were to ­suggest it, stay until next week.

  How many times have we been here? A hundred? Two hundred? A thousand times? And yet each time you have to go through this laborious process of occupying and possessing the place. I can’t help you in any way other than by doing everything the way we usually do it, in the same order, with the same things. Showing you that nothing has changed here. They say that the goldfish in its bowl has such a short memory that each time it swims round it’s a new experience for it to reach the starting point once again. You, who have an associative memory that computer technology might envy, struggle with the opposite problem: until recognition has been established on an almost one-to-one basis you are hesitant and cautious, and dare not let yourself go.

  Except at home, for inside the house other rules apply. There we have unwittingly — because we have a considerable talent for making a mess, if not always an equally great tolerance for it — trained you since you were small to live with shifting disorder. Let them say what they like, the therapists and the pedagogues, but I am in no doubt that the unpredictability at home has been good for you and has lifted a burden from your heavily laden shoulders — obviously because the framework, the walls of the house, and your family, has remained stable and unchanging. Had we made the effort, moreover, had we made it our full-time job to ensure that you would always find the cheese slicer in the same place, the tape in the third drawer under the glass cupboard, and the toothpaste to the right and not to the left of the bathroom tap, then I fear we would have made you anxious in your own home. Just the thought of your first having to inspect the house each time you returned from school, checking that everything was as it usually is, that the rug that yesterday lay horizontal on the floorboards in the living room did not today lie perpendicular or at a diagonal, that home was a place you were able to feel at home!

  No, if we can’t find the cheese slicer then we’ll just have to teach you instead how to cut cheese with a knife. Because that’s possible too, Gabriel. It’s called improvising, which is exactly what I’m doing now, because believe it or not, I’ve managed to forget the brush to oil the chops with. How about that? We’ll have to use our fingers instead. Want to help?

  And, meticulously, you marinade the meat, first with your index finger, soon using your whole fist, delighted to have been almost ordered to mess with the food. As soon as the smells begin to waft from the grill, Balder runs up, tail wagging, and we chat away about this and that, nothing serious or important. The chops are juicy, the sun shines, and time flies. Not a word is mentioned about the lump of real gold you might be getting from Morten, for you are a prince and I am Your Highness, we’re filthy rich, and full to bursting, but of course we’ve room for a bar of chocolate for dessert, and coffee and warm cocoa — we’ve room for anything, and soon we’ll set out on a real treasure hunt again, because kings and princes can never get enough gold and silver and precious stones, that’s precisely why they’re kings and princes, and at home in our castle Queen Henni is waiting, and Princess Victoria, and there’s Children’s Hour on television, and we are something as simple and safe as a father and son and dog on our way home in a boat on a wonderful Tuesday evening in October.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The gym is full. There are so many pupils here, and parents and brothers and sisters, that the teachers exchange small, conspiratorial winks and neglect to enforce the prohibition against climbing on the wall-bars when some of the bigger, more audacious children have a go. There has to be some elasticity to the rules: it’s celebration time at school, and the air is already dense with tension.

  Practice makes perfect, they say, and God knows there’s been practising — at school, at friends’ houses, at home. But it’s one t
hing to stand in front of classmates, or in pairs in front of the bedroom mirror, or in the living room in front of Mom and Dad. To stand on stage, on the other hand, in front of all those many others, in front of unknown adults who live elsewhere, to be a debutant, even if it’s in the gym — because tonight it ­doesn’t look like a gym at all — is another story altogether. It’s now or never, it’s one single chance to succeed, to remember

  all the verses, all the steps, to look good in the dress, in the ­costume, the hairstyle — or to forget, stumble and stutter, and be a complete disgrace, to lose face and honour and never be able to look people in the eye again.

  No, to be in second grade and perform at a school festival in front of a hundred, perhaps a hundred and fifty people, is no joke.

  AT FIRST WE THOUGHT it had to be a joke, Mom and I. But your teacher was serious.

  — This is something he’s chosen himself and he can do it, she said firmly, with the sort of authority that only comes with a long life in teaching.

  She’s a wise and sensible woman, your teacher. She and the others who look after you at school, the Head Teacher, the Deputy Head, the Special Needs Teacher, and the Welfare Assistants. You are lucky — we are lucky. Every day we send you off to school, confident that you will be surrounded by people who wish you well, who stretch their patience and their budgets as far as they can in order to give you eventful, meaningful days. And if their patience runs out, as it does from time to time, they check themselves, take you outside and explain why, and you come home and explain to us what happened and why, and perhaps you’ve learned something about how even the grown-ups at school can be impatient and make mistakes. And if their budgets run out, as they always do, then they improvise and dip into their own pockets rather than miss out on a two-day course in another town to learn more about the difficulties faced by this boy who’s been placed in their care.

  A “splendid,” a “lovely” boy they tell us in your daily report, a “wonderful boy.” Even though you sometimes bite them, hit, kick, throw stones, run off . . . when they don’t get it right, no matter how hard they try. When you’ve had “not a good day,” as they discreetly put it.

  A couple of days before Christmas break you came home glowing with pride. You carried an enormous cup that looked remarkably like silver. This was after an autumn during which, in the course of a single week, you had acquired two skills that you’d persisted in persuading both yourself and the rest of us you would never learn to master: the art of reading and writing, and biking without training wheels. Your classmates had been doing both for a long time, and suddenly you became their equal. It happened so quickly that you could scarcely believe it, not until everyone in the schoolyard had seen you biking, and the whole class had heard you read. In recognition of these twin triumphs your teachers had chosen to buy a huge trophy, which now towers over the other treasures in your room.

  I don’t know which you were more proud of — your newly acquired skills or the trophy itself, the visible proof that you were valued as a winner by the adults at school. But I do know, Gabriel, that they all deserve a medal. Unfortunately, that won’t happen, because the world isn’t like that. People who do so much more, but say that they’re only doing their job, don’t mention it, it’s a pleasure and we won’t give up — people like that never get any medals. On the other hand, our gratitude is brightly polished and shining, and that they have. I know that they have yours too, which you express in your own way, with a hug and an unexpected smile, and with the greatest accolade of all: never once do you dread going to school.

  — YES, BUT . . . ARE YOU really going to let Gabriel ­perform on his own, with a song?

  — He’ll be fine. We’ll help him. Just make sure you practise regularly with him at home.

  Again that weight of experience that makes a good teacher hard to contradict.

  And of course we’d practise, make our contribution to this . . . experiment. As long as it was something you yourself wished. When we asked if you wanted to do this, if you really wanted to stand alone on the stage and sing for all the others, you immediately replied yes. But a little too immediately, I thought. A ­little too overwhelmed, surprised to be asked at all, you who were usually excused from participating long before anyone thought of asking if you wanted to take part. Of course we would practise.

  Learning the words and the melody came naturally to you. You have an auditory memory that at times can be eerie. Mom and I have experienced standing in the kitchen together, making dinner and conversing about things that concern only us, our voices kept low even though you’re sitting in the far corner of the living room apparently minding your own business — and then a week, a fortnight later hear you repeat verbatim extracts from our conversation, usually introduced by: Why did you say to Mom that . . . ?

  Or the two of us have returned from a shopping trip and you sit on the garden wall to finish your ice cream. As I stagger up the steps with the heavy plastic bags I hear a rendition in English, which is otherwise completely foreign to you, of the words and melody of a song from A cd I played for the first time in the car on the way home, while you sat and stared out of the window, seemingly totally disconnected.

  To brush your teeth before you go to bed or to lock the car door as I must have told you to do a thousand times when we park outside the shopping mall are capsules of information that you seem to delete each time you’re done using them. But a conversation not meant for your ears, the voice of a person you’ve scarcely met, the lyrics of a song, be it in Abkhazian — those you save at once. Yet I find no system to your criteria for deleting and saving, for what you pack away in oblivion and what you preserve in memory. Songs, verses, and lyrics that you’ve heard many times and that, if only for that reason, should be etched in your memory, you often forget between repetitions. The national anthem, for example, which you practise at school every year before National Day, or the psalm I have sung you to sleep with for years at your bedside.

  Nor do I know whether you have a system or not. Probably your sorting principles are as enigmatic to you as they are to me. Besides, I suppose that you find the whole question strange and irrelevant — that is, after all, how you are.

  NO, WORDS AND MELODY were soon mastered. You had, moreover, chosen that particular song because it was about something that interested you greatly.

  I’m not sure whether it began with a video of Captain Sabretooth or with the cartoon film version of Treasure Island. In any case, it wasn’t long before your greatest wish was to be a pirate yourself, albeit a good one, if such a thing were possible. For a long time you wished it so much that it was hard for you to accept that pirates belonged to “the old days” and didn’t exist anymore, that you’d quite simply been born too late. Your engagement was so complete that there were times when we doubted whether or not you were aware of the difference between our house and your “castle,” between our boat and your “ship,” between seven-year-old Gabriel and “Captain” Gabriel. To some extent we played along, sometimes, I must confess, from motives that were less than pure — for example, to make you eat fish.

  — Phooey! I’m no landlubber! Look, I can eat fish just like that!

  Much more important than your attitude to fish, however, was your understanding of what was and was not real. We needed to know, to feel certain that you were quite clear about when something was “just pretend” and when it was “for real.” Because you didn’t play at buccaneering, you went buccaneering, and in that reality there were different rules. When, in keeping with these rules, you did something that was highly inappropriate and even dangerous according to the rules of ordinary reality, it was often difficult to reach you. If we addressed you with the logic and language of our world, you perceived it in your world as a kind of infringement of prevailing law and order, and the most awful scenes might ensue and last until you gave up, exhausted by tears and rage and despair. As
we grew exhausted by our own despair, we gradually learned to take a different approach: to follow you into your world and, on its linguistic and logical terms, coax you back. If you sat digging in the dirt searching for an elusive treasure (which you at some “unconscious” level knew had to be there somewhere, you being the one who’d buried it!) and we needed you to come inside and change into clean clothes because dinner was waiting for us at Grandma’s and Grandpa’s, it would have led to several hours of disaster had we insisted and threatened with ordinary, exasperated parental authority. Far better to sacrifice a freshly ironed shirt, dig for the treasure together with you, and be just as aghast a pirate as you when Mom came out and told us she’d read in an old book that digging for gold ducats before nightfall could lead to eternal damnation. That was a language you understood:

  — Then we’ve got to wait until it gets dark! Come on, let’s go inside and wash off this deadly dangerous dirt!

  — Yes, that’s probably best, we answered, reckoning that a long Sunday dinner at Grandma’s would fill your thoughts with other bounties.

  It didn’t always work, this strategy, and it demanded a lot of imagination and patience, but it did at least work often enough to make it worth the trouble. I’m not certain when it was that you gradually began to develop the ability to know, and to let us know that you were aware of what was “just pretend” and what was “for real.” But two things certainly played their part: a play and a carnival.