Somewhere Over the Sea

by Halfdan Freihow

  You didn’t understand, and it made you confused and ashamed, and you went and lay down on the sofa and buried your head in the cushion and didn’t want me to see you crying. We’ve talked about it later several times, but still you have trouble accepting that right can change places according to where you point with your right arm. In one way, I imagine, it’s evidence of a kind of humility, as though you don’t presume that your arms have the power of decision over something as big as the position of right and left.

  It’s usually called a paradox when two things that are self-contradictory can be true at the same time. For example, when right can be on both sides of the road. Or when something that feels good and safe can also be painful. If a Norwegian says that all Norwegians lie — is he then telling the truth, or is he lying? Is he perhaps doing both? It seems impossible and confusing, but not even paradoxes are dangerous, they’re just yet another thrilling way in which the world can be explained and experienced. Believe me, you yourself are something of a paradox, complex and unpredictable and challenging, never boring, never monotonous, and never easy to fathom. You’re simply a whole language, Gabriel.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Sometimes it has already been dark for a long time, sometimes the sun is still riding high in the sky. The house might be empty apart from the two of us and the animals, or it might be full of life and laughter, music and conversation. No matter what, you always have to go to bed, and each evening it seems to you just as unreasonable.

  It isn’t hard to understand you. For someone with no grasp of clock-time, only of before-and-after time, it cannot be easy to come to terms with the fact that the words “late,” “evening,” and, “night” should all carry the same merciless implication of bed and sleep, regardless of whether the summer sky is scintillatingly bright or winter darkness has long since fallen, whether guests are gathered for a party in the living room, or the house is one big sleepy yawn.

  And yet bedtime is each time an occasion for reconciliation. A day that broke containing every possibility has come to an end. Most of them came to nothing, and that is an experience of loss we will go on living with. As a rule, the days resemble one another to the point of confusion. They are everydays, and little has happened: the sun has risen, the wind has blown, and it has been a good day, or not. Even good and bad days can be hard to distinguish, for they are like all other good and bad days. And this too, that the everyday days come and go so anonymously and quietly that we hardly notice them, that they seem unlived, or lived through as though in a trance, is something we will come to terms with. Moreover, we will manage to let go of those days that simply want to go on, that refuse to end, that are so spectacular, so brimming with power and energy that they splash over into the night with laughter and magic and joy, or with grief and violence and tears. Even to these we will not cling.

  At bedtime we only cling to each other, not to time, because we have lost it, it is gone. At bedtime only the body and the certainty of nearness remain, and the promise that nearness gives, that all is forgiven, and that tomorrow we will not be alone.

  WHEN IT’S YOUR BEDTIME and you can choose, because both Mom and I are home, you always give clear instructions about who you want to put you to bed. It’s impossible to discover a pattern in your choices, but you are never in doubt. Your decision is final and irrevocable, and only very rarely will you entertain an objection or an alternative solution. Once you have picked Mom, that’s final. It doesn’t matter that I might want to, or that she might prefer to sit and watch the news in peace. Nor do you see any reason to change your choice if I am the one you have picked, even if I explain that I have a long night’s work ahead, whereas Mom actually would like a cuddle with you:

  — That’s not a problem, Mom can just come up afterwards, when we’re finished.

  This evening I am the lucky recipient of your favour. Mom and Victoria have had their goodnight hugs, and Balder, who knows what the sight of Gabriel in pajamas means, has sneaked on ahead to claim a place at the foot of the bed.

  Stepping inside your room, shutting the world out with the blinds, we also put behind us the day and all that it has been. At bedtime your room is a time capsule, freed from house and calendar, in which we can travel and dream. But first everything must find its proper place.

  The reindeer hide has to be over the sheet, and the velvet Siamese pillow with the elephant embroidered in gold has to be next to the ordinary pillow, over which the goatskin is draped. The golden silk blanket has to be ready so that you can spread it over yourself and sleep with a membrane of China between your body and the duvet. On the shelf above the bed a couple of Buddhas, a conch, a glossy silver money box in the form of horse and a miniature brass canon on wheels have taken up permanent abode. Each evening they are supplemented with a handful of other treasures, and this time it is the turn of the opals and the mother-of-pearls. It takes a long time to find them, especially the ones you hid in the cellar a few days ago and have forgotten where, but which I seem to remember I saw behind the dirty laundry basket, and which — thank God — turns out to be exactly where they are.

  Then you have to choose a book. We read to you almost every evening, but never know beforehand which book you want to have read. In these matters too you follow a hidden pattern, or perhaps it’s simply whimsical. Whatever, it cannot be taken for granted that you’ll wish to continue with the story you heard the beginning of yesterday, especially not if it was Mom who was reading to you. At times it seems as though you choose your books by voice — Pinocchio ought to be Mom, Ronja the Pirate Girl is best for Dad.

  At last we lie down, you on the velvet pillow beneath the oriental silk, me under a crocheted Norwegian quilt with a rolled-up teddy bear to cushion my head. I open the book to begin, but you interrupt at once:

  — My heartsticks!

  You’re referring to the chopsticks of blue, yellow, red, and green plastic, which you collected at cafés and restaurants in Thailand. These are heart-shaped at one end and you have, I believe, forty-six of them. Now you have to get out of bed to make sure that they are lying as they should be lying — on the table, sorted by colour into groups and, not almost but exactly, parallel. They are, but you deliberately dislodge a couple in order to put them back, with immense precision and great satisfaction. It is as though you need to prove to yourself that you are able to restore order to even the most trivial cases of disarray.

  You return to bed and make yourself comfortable. It is an ordinary single bed and you are a child, but your body needs room. We are to lie close, but not too close; you want the blanket and the duvet well wrapped around you, but they mustn’t be tight, and they will be unless I move even farther out towards the edge. You want to be able to see the book while I’m reading, so my arm on your side has to lie flat, but not between us, because then there won’t be enough room. In the end I’m lying with one foot on the floor, the opposing arm twisted up across my chest, with the slightly uncomfortable edge of the bed sticking into my back. But you lie there like a prince, and we can abandon ourselves to the storytelling.

  FAIRY TALES AND ADVENTURE stories have the same status for you as playing “let’s pretend” — in fact, such stories are even a touch less real, since they’re not even a product of your own imagination, in which the categories of reality constantly overflow into one another. Invented stories are like cartoon films, they’re funny and odd, they can be exciting and a bit frightening, but you know that they are not really real. Moreover, you’re secure in the knowledge that you cannot be held responsible for anything that happens in them: they are, so to speak, not your fault, and everything that does not require you relating to it as if you were a part of the chain of cause and effect is a relief to you. Admittedly, this does not prevent you from using scenes from adventure stories as partial arguments in pursuit of some goal, as when you point out that the Indian boys in Pocahontas are allowed to carry knives on thei
r own in the forest, so why must you always have a grown-up with you? In cases like this you are, nevertheless, aware of the limited validity of your argument, and give up as soon as we make the point that it doesn’t count, that’s something you can only do in cartoons.

  — Oh yes, I forgot, you hasten to say, even though you haven’t forgotten anything at all, but just want to assure us that you know the difference between the pretend and the real.

  Books are a different matter. Books can contain fairy tales and adventure stories, but they can also contain descriptions of how, for example, a volcano works, or of which animals live where in the world. Books are, by nature, marred by unreliability, for you cannot know beforehand whether what’s in them is true or invented. Is that perhaps even the reason behind your inexplicable aversion to reading them? Because you were in some way afraid to digest information that you had no way of knowing how to handle?

  In this respect, books resemble television. You know, because we have said so, that what they show in the news is “true,” but you find it difficult to understand the difference when you see a film. After all, the people in a film are living people, so how can you tell when they’re actors who are pretending and when they’re really just being themselves?

  — It isn’t dangerous, it’s probably just acting, you might say when you see scenes of war on the evening news. A little later it seems just as obvious to you to ask, when you see Tarzan entering a palace in the jungle, whether we can go there too.

  The best is if we begin by defining the content of the books we read to you and the films you watch, so that you can tune in to the correct frequency: emotional involvement, for stories that are just pretend; or receptive, for the acquisition of reliable information. Cases where the location of the content is in recognizable, “real” surroundings, but the content itself an invention, pose particular difficulties. You have to deal with the fact that something can be simultaneously real and imaginary. You accept it reluctantly when I compare the situation to those times when you play at being a king who lives in a castle, even though in reality you are Gabriel, and live in a house: you are both a pretend king and a real Gabriel. Your reluctance proceeds naturally from the fact that there is a logical flaw in the reasoning — play is essentially make-believe, so reality doesn’t actually have anything to do with it.

  An almost insurmountable trial that initially drove you to the brink of fury arose as we sat one evening and watched an American documentary film — a genre that is, by definition, really real — in which pictures of the New York skyline were shown. There were the Twin Towers in all their majesty, and yet you knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that they no longer existed, for on countless occasions, in trustworthy news broadcasts, you had seen them collapse to the ground. In other words, they were lying on television, even though I had said that what we were watching was “for real.” My simple observation that the film was made before September 11 seemed to you a dubious piece of sophistry, for on television and in books the chronological and therefore conceivable progression of time is abandoned, and the only time you can rely on is the time of your own subjective experience. The order in which you experience events is for you also the actual order of events. And no one was going to try to get you to believe that buildings you had seen explode and crumble to dust long ago could suddenly rise up just as whole and unharmed.

  However, this was one problem where you found the solution yourself: I had been mistaken. The documentary was just acting after all.

  — But it doesn’t matter, Dad. I get it wrong too sometimes when I think something is for real. Let’s not talk any more about it.

  NOW I LIE HERE and read to you. We have fastened a sky of luminous planets to the ceiling above us, and it is impossible to tell from your eyes whether you are in the forest with Ronja and the pirates, on your way from Saturn to Pluto in a spaceship, or somewhere else completely that I know nothing about. You lie still and silent, and even though I know you’re listening, I don’t know if what you hear goes directly into storage deep down in your memory or if it first passes through your consciousness for processing.

  You always listen and you hear everything, but it often seems as though you simply archive it for later use. Whichever, you very frequently show no noticeable reaction to what is being said. We have gradually learned not always to demand an answer when we talk to you, for there are times when you seem to be storing information without even being aware of the fact yourself. If we ask what you think after we have told you something, you might look at us uncomprehendingly, with apparently no idea of what we are talking about. But later that same day, or after a week, you might suddenly, in a quite different context, pick up the thread and request a more extensive, a better explanation.

  Bedtime reading is over for today. I close the book, lay it to one side, and turn off the lamp above your bed. You turn in toward the wall, feel with a hand behind your back just to make certain I’m still there and haven’t tried to sneak out of the bed. We lie like this and hear each other exhale at the close of day in the pale green sheen of the solar system above us. After a while, you turn over on your back again, a sure sign that you want to talk.

  — Hey, Dad?

  — Yes, Gabriel?

  — Who’s going to look after me when I’m grown up, when you and Mom die and I can’t live with you anymore? Because I have to live in my own house when I’m a grown-up. Do you think I’ll be completely alone?

  These questions pain me where I am most vulnerable, but you ask them in a quiet, sober voice. They convey little more than clinical, sincere curiosity, as though you were inquiring about train times or holiday plans. All the same, it’s hard for me to believe in the serenity. I feel something swell in my throat, a physical response to something inconsolable in you that I sense you must carry with you always, simply to be able to formulate such questions.

  — No, I don’t think you’ll be alone, Gabriel. There are so many people who love you, I say, turning toward you and stroking your cheek.

  You turn too, look straight at me with a look I cannot fathom in the dim, planetary light, and continue:

  — Imagine, perhaps I’ll be completely alone when I grow up, just me and my house when it’s time to go to bed, and no one to look after me! What’ll I do then, Dad?

  Now it is you who strokes my cheek, as though you sense that I am the one who needs comfort. My throat has become so constricted that all I can do is mumble:

  — I don’t know, son, I don’t know.

  I DON’T KNOW. It’s a pitiful reply to questions that are so honest and big and important. Pitiful, and yet any other answer would have been an insult to you, for it would have been a lie. Mom and I think constantly about what you’re going to do the day you become, in your own way, an adult, the day when we are no longer there, the day when you are left to fend for yourself. And we don’t know. We watch with great joy how you grow and become stronger, how you develop abilities and knowledge like any other child, how your personality gradually forms. But we don’t know, we cannot know if this will be enough. If you and the world will learn to accept each other, to understand enough of each other to live together in tolerance. We cannot know if you will be completely alone, Gabriel, nor can we know if you will manage to be completely alone.

  Your prospects for the future preoccupy you, and every now and then you ask if you will always have your problems — usually with an implicit hope that they will go away and you will one day be “well.” At times like that we never lie to you but answer, yes, unfortunately, your problems will be with you all your life, or at least for as long as medical science is unable to cure them.

  When I speak of your problems to others, I sometimes compare you to someone who was born without a little finger: it will never grow, and the person affected must spend his whole life with only nine fingers. But, I hasten to add, that doesn’t mean that a p
erson like that can never become an outstanding concert pianist or a surgeon, with sufficient help and practice. Life must simply be adjusted to allow for the absence of this one finger. In the same way you will have to accept that your problems will be with you for the rest of your life. That does not mean — far from it — that you will continue to be a troubled child. To the contrary: your body, your intelligence, and your sensibilities will mature and develop, and you will turn into a grown man with many possibilities. If you are given help along the way, and in addition learn to help yourself, there is no reason why you shouldn’t live a long and good and rich life.

  — I WANT TO GET MARRIED when I grow up, you say.

  Is that because you are a child and want to live an adult life in the only way you know of, together with someone you love, like Mom and I? Is that all? Or do you already know, intuitively, without understanding what it is you know, that you will need someone, that it will be too difficult alone? Is it a practical solution to a practical problem you are envisioning? Is that why you add, as though you needed an instruction manual:

  — But how will I be able to get married when I’m grown up?

  — Don’t worry about that now. There’s a long time to go before you’re big enough to decide whether you want to get married.

  The truth is, I try to talk the whole problem away. I try to push it into the future, as if a better answer lay waiting there. The truth is that I fear the question because I don’t believe it has a happy answer, and because it therefore nourishes a deep grief. The truth is I don’t know if you will ever marry, Gabriel, and have a family of your own. Love between adults is the most complex relationship that exists. It demands so much of all that you do not have and do not understand, of a language that is often ambiguous and unspoken and implied, of such a deeply empathic acceptance of another human that at times it feels like losing oneself. You, who fumbles so with the idea of your own self, who struggles to understand that other people have another self, and that you must relinquish a little of yours and accept a little of theirs in order to establish even the most superficial social relationships — will you be able to live in community and in marriage?