The Book of Dreams
Page 28
Henri
At certain times, herring gulls and great black-backed gulls wheel together in tight circles over the bay. One of those times is now, as the water takes on that metallic blue color and the setting sun spreads its lava on the surface of the sea.
I’m waiting for them and so when they arrive, I’m not surprised to see Madelyn holding my son’s hand. They walk along the very edge of this small beach not far from Ty Kerk, a place where both the tides and the worlds blur into one another.
Eddie, Sam, and Madelyn. I approach them silently, without their noticing me. I lay my arms on Eddie’s and Sam’s shoulders, and together we watch the sun go down. These sunsets at the world’s end—or, some would say, its beginning—are the most beautiful to be found anywhere on earth. Every day they paint the sky in different colors. Today the clouds trail away into small blobs, and planes trace zigzag vapor trails across a white-gold canvas that brightens to the color of ripe apricots at the edges.
“Hello, Henri,” says Eddie, smiling at the sea, and the sparkling light pours into her eyes.
“Hello, my darling.”
It is always said that we may take no earthly treasures with us when we die. No money or possessions, none of our beauty or power. That is correct. Some who have switched worlds have been intensely bewildered at first that they were unable to carry anything tangible with them.
But there’s a second truth. We can take anything with us that we could not hoard during our lifetimes because it could only be felt, sometimes for a few brief heartbeats, sometimes only in secret. We can take joy with us, and love. Every beautiful moment from our lives. All the light we have peacefully admired, all the lovely scents and laughter and friendship we have collected. Every kiss, every caress, and every song. The wind on our faces; tango; music; the rustle of autumn grass, stiff with frozen dew; the twinkle of the stars; contentment; courage; and generosity. All those things we may take with us. All that is in between.
“Don’t leave empty-hearted,” I whisper to them.
They take one another’s hands and watch the sun disappear below the sea, guardian of us all, with our dreams and our lives.
Hand in hand, they walk back to Ty Kerk, and I go with them, invisible, casting no shadow. Wilder Glass has lit a fire in my grandfather’s hearth, and when he looks at Eddie he is happy and still a little self-conscious. She loves him, and I seldom visit her in her dreams. I follow them singing, and as I sing, I recall everything I used to be.
I can see all the paths that lie open to Madelyn, Sam, and Eddie. I see the moments that will be decisive for them: they show up in a different hue. Still, their future path together is positive.
I sing of the dancing waves out in the Iroise Sea, and I know exactly how it feels when the summer sea leaps against the rocks and dances to the song of the wind. I evoke the complexion of the spring tide and the winter seas, of the light when it rains and the sky turns black and yet the sun still dapples the surface of the lead-gray sea with islands of brightness. I sing of dark blue, turquoise, midnight blue and morning gray, milk-white and bottle-green waves; of the sky’s powerful love for that hot-tempered, multicolored woman, the Iroise Sea, so powerful that it both takes on her colors and lends new ones to her so that they might meld together as closely as love—boundless, inseparable, without distinction between above and below, without end, and without question.
Eddie turns around one last time before closing the door and says under her breath, “Henri Malo Skinner.”
For an instant I feel the wind on my face and taste the salt in the air. I brush a curl from Eddie’s brow. She smiles as if she can feel my touch. Maybe she can.
There’s more between life and death than we can tell from here.
Afterword and Thanks
The better I got on with my father, the more scared I became that he might die and leave me alone in this life without the conversations, shelter, and inner peace that his presence gave me. For years I couldn’t sleep because of a nagging, bitter anxiety that kept me awake at night: what if my best friend, my confidant in tax and “man” matters and my teammate in the George household, were really to die one day, this person whose love and insight and understanding I cherished, whose light and bigheartedness I needed?
“I’d never survive,” I whispered desperately into the darkness of my room when I was in my midtwenties. Later, I numbed my panic with whiskey, a drink that gave me no pleasure. Later still, I reassured myself with the thought that he would die only a long way into the future. He was a strong, energetic, and loving man, and so much life would be hard to extinguish.
It all happened in the space of eleven days, and on April 4, 2011, Wolfgang George died far too early, at the age of seventy-two. I was thirty-eight, and the person I was before did not survive.
My fear of Dad’s dying, and then his actual, horribly sudden death, which blew a hole in the normal course of my life, have shaped my life and my writing. Dying and death. Mourning and surviving. Our own fear of one-day-not-being-here-anymore. The question: was that it? And the haunting doubt: when death comes, will I have lived the life I might have lived?
These existential questions about death have colored my last three novels, The Little Paris Bookshop, The Little French Bistro, and The Book of Dreams. To produce these books, which address issues of being and no-longer-being, have no happy endings, and are therefore not very “market friendly,” I needed book people who were willing to tread this kind of literary path with me. First, an author as manic as I am—my husband, Jens. He’s always the first to fan the sparks of my ideas, saying, “Yes, do it. Break through boundaries. Why write otherwise?” Discussions with him open thousands of doors in my mind.
My second traveling companion is my editor Andrea Müller, a woman who never lies. This can occasionally cause me pain and shame, but her critical enthusiasm is the foundation on which I build my stories, in the certain knowledge that Mrs. Müller will always make the good things better and give me an earful about whatever didn’t make the grade.
The reactions of initial readers such as my congenial final editor Gisela Klemt, my congenial agent Anja Keil, and my meticulous webmistress Angela Schwarze tell me if I’ve “bared” my soul enough in my manuscript. I would also like to thank Barbara Henze and Marion Barciaga for their ideas and feedback.
And, last but not least, I would like to thank you the bookseller, you the sales representative, and you the reader. Books are the only works of art that only really come into being in the mind and soul of their audience.
If you notice any mistakes in the novel, rest assured that I am entirely to blame. Please write to the publisher, and we’ll try to rectify them in a future edition.
The Book of Dreams completes my cycle of novels about mortality. I needed to write about fear and transience and to portray the points where life and death meet as a sort of fairy-tale place brimming with parallel realities, a transitional zone among all worlds, heaven, and earth. None of us knows if this zone really exists or if it is born of our thoughts and hopes and fears.
Only now do I feel that I am emotionally free enough and, being in my forties, have enough “living” under my belt to devote my next major novel cycle to life.
More reading soon!
Regards,
Nina George
Berlin/Trévignon, December 27, 2015
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