My first thought was you. What were you doing out, what had happened? A queue of possible and impossible answers at once formed, and then dissolved just as quickly, for in the bed beside me you too were waking up. I had slept in the guest room so that I could get up with you without waking Mom, and you must have come down to me at some point in the night.
The sound of shouting and hammering did not stop. It only grew louder the clearer my head became.
— Carry on sleeping, I’ll be right back, I said.
I grabbed a pair of trousers and a shirt, threw them on, and staggered out the door and up the stairs. On the way into the living room I saw Mom coming out of the bedroom in her dressing gown, a sleepy question in her eyes. The Easter sun had already risen, and in the sharp backlight through the window we saw the outline of a woman. She stood there pounding with her fist on the terrace door. In the crook of one arm she was holding a small dog.
I didn’t recognize her immediately, but Mom saw that it was the tenant of a neighbouring house a couple hundred metres behind us. When we opened up, we were met by a dissolved and tear-streaked face and a garbled, almost hyperventilated flood of words. We tried to get her to come in, but she wouldn’t, stood still with the dog squeezed under her arm and repeated the same shouted words over and over again. We recognized one of them: fire. At the same moment we realized that what we had taken for morning mist in the east was actually clouds of smoke coming from the house behind the barn.
We knew that she lived alone there with her little daughter, and were suddenly gripped by an anxious fear. I grabbed her firmly by the shoulders and shook her and tried to fix her gaze: Is your daughter in the house? In reply she only wept and cried out fragmented sentences that were impossible to make any sense of. We repeated the question several times, and I felt a touch of panic as we picked up phrases like “inside the house” and “must get out.” We managed to get her into the living room and down into a chair, and Mom set off running. I was to ring the emergency services and try to calm the woman down, attempt to get a definite answer out of her and find the fire-fighting equipment.
It’s incredible how quickly it is possible to think. While on the phone and at the same time trying to pacify the woman, I saw Mom through the window, running, and it was as if I were running with her, racing to get there first. Even in the midst of two desperately important conversations I had all the time in the world to think: What does one do with a burned child, a child who has inhaled smoke? Can the doctors do anything at all for her? It looks like a fine day; we should go out in the boat. There’s a bit of a breeze blowing from the southeast, I can see that from the smoke, so the little island isn’t a good idea today. Is it true that our neighbour’s house is a burning house? How shall I tell the mother that she has lost her daughter?
WE NEARLY LOST YOU ONCE, we thought. You were just six, seven, maybe eight weeks old, I don’t remember. It was late in the evening and time for your feeding. You, who had always been so ravenous, who could never get enough, lay weak and feeble in the bed without even the strength to take the breast into your mouth. You disappeared from us, were on the point of leaving, and your body was burning. We shook you in terror, tried to call you back, turned and lifted your head. Mom forced breast and milk in between your lips, and late in the night you finally opened your eyes. You had a frighteningly high fever, but it passed, and you came back to us.
We almost lost Alexander even before he was born, in a nasty car accident; someone ran into Mom and permanently damaged her knee. Incredibly, the fetus that was due to be born in three weeks time was unhurt. Since then we’ve nearly lost him on several other occasions, to forces and urges that tried to appropriate both his love of life and his life itself. But we got him back too.
Sometimes we have also lost each other, lost sight of each other in the turmoil, in the fog of everyday life, in the mist of habit, in new and unfamiliar faces. But we found the way back and returned home.
We can’t afford to lose more than the time that passes by itself, Gabriel. What we have left is too little.
HOW FIRES WREAK HAVOC with the discretion of closed doors! Like family quarrels, personal tragedies, abuse. When Mom opened the front door and entered the vestibule, all she sensed was the smell and the heat. Then she pushed open the door to the hallway, and I picture the flames hissing to her, telling her that she would lose herself in there.
She was standing on the stoop, choking as she gasped for breath, as I came running with the fire extinguisher and news that the daughter was probably safe: there was another little dog still in there — I thought. The mother’s speech was still incoherent, so I could not be sure; perhaps a little girl really was dying inside the house. I wrapped my shirt around my nose and mouth and dived into the blackness, but was at once blinded and struggling for breath. A living black wall of sooty smoke engulfed the air around me, sucked it out of my lungs and left something there instead that my body refused to absorb. I did not want to, but I had to get out, and then it was my turn to kneel on the stoop. Afterwards we emptied the extinguisher through a window, to precious little avail. The house was consumed by fire, and our attempts to put it out merely a joke. Besides, we could now hear the sound of sirens from over the hill and it was time to make way for the experts.
It was only then that I realized you were standing there watching, barefoot and in pajamas, and with our garden hose in your hand. You had pulled it loose from the tap and dragged it with you in order to help, with no definite plan of how to fill it with water, but all the more with a desire to be of assistance. I went over to you and wrapped my arms tightly around you, as though you had just been rescued from the sea of flames. I could not rid myself of the image of a little girl in there. We still did not know whether this was a hideous death by fire, or only a sad story about a house that burned down, and perhaps a dog that dieD.
WE LOSE SO MANY THINGS, Gabriel. We lose all the time, and we grieve for what is gone. Or perhaps we grieve most for the feeling of loss, the certainty of having lost, rather than for what we have lost. Ask me, because I know grief.
Do you want to know about grief? Shall I explain grief to you?
It still happens, though not as often as before, in the beginning, the first years, that grief strikes. Now it happens at intervals of weeks and months, but it always happens suddenly and unexpectedly, as in an ambush, and each time it overwhelms me, overrides everything else and makes me turn away and cry
a little.
I don’t know if I can explain grief to you, Gabriel, even though perhaps you already know it, but under other names, that hurt in other ways. My grief is adult and difficult. It isn’t your confusion when you don’t understand, when your thoughts crash, as you put it, and you can’t manage to think any of them all the way through. Nor is it the despair you might experience then, that makes you scream and weep and hit out in anger, that makes you look at me with wounded, pleading eyes, praying that I explain to you why, why, why. The despair you lie down with on the floor, pressed up against a wall or a piece of furniture, powerless and ashamed. Nor is grief the embarrassment you struggle with afterwards, once it’s over, when you compel your gaze to defy shyness, to bring it back from the remote emptiness in which it has sought refuge and, with defencelessness in your eyes ask if I love you anyway, if we can be friends again forever.
What can I tell you about grief?
Grief is as big as the sky and the universe, as big as infinity, which we’ve talked about and none of us understands. Grief is as big as the riddle you puzzle all of science with, just by being you. As big as inscrutability, as big as the tiny little seed life neglected to plant in you, your difference, the absence that will always follow you and fill me with grief.
But this isn’t an answer, I know that. Forgive me.
There’s a grief in everything, Gabriel, in the flowers and the rain, in treasures and dream
s. Grief is losing, grief is not to have. Grief is certainty. Grief is life that slips, time that passes, what could have been, but was not. Grief is helplessness. There’s room for everything in the mansion of grief. It’s dark and snug in the mansion of grief, and it’s lonely. Grief is to catch the wind, grasp water in your fist. Grief is quiet. Grief is polite. It comes, and then it goes away. But grief is never gone. Only things are gone when they disappear. Grief is impossible, GabrieL.
THE FIREMEN ARRIVED, and the police, and it was eventually established that the daughter was safe — she had spent the night at her grandparents. The other little dog, which had been stuck inside the house when the mother came over to us, had probably run out when Mom or I opened the door and tried to get in. It was found in good shape.
Neither of these two happy endings affected you. All that interested you were the uniforms, the equipment, the jets of water and the very big and very red fire engines.
More locals and a lot of children had turned up, and now that the fire no longer threatened tragedy and death, it became an occasion. Some popped back home to fetch a Thermos, others their cameras, and we stood around in groups and talked about the possible causes, and the living-room window that looked as if it might explode at any moment under the pressure, and what a shame it was about the house, newly redecorated and all, and what a gorgeous day it looked to become. Even the firemen and the policemen strolled over for a chat during their breaks, and all things considered it was a fine morning hour — all the more so since the owners of the house were off in the mountains, so no one felt under any obligation to temper their good mood with tactful, head-shaking empathy.
By late morning everyone had had enough, the firemen, the spectators, and the local paper. It was over. A soot-stained and boarded-up shell surrounded the burned-out core of the house — it was said that the flames had eaten a full inch into the timbered walls. Only the insurance company could seek to profit from what was left. We went home, packed food and drink, and took off to seA.
YOU SPOKE LITTLE TO US that day, wandered around a great deal on your own. Mom and I bathed in the sun, happy and carefree. Perhaps it was because the day had already been so eventful, perhaps because we have taught ourselves to grab whatever free time offers itself, perhaps simply because we were thoughtless — but we didn’t speak much to you either.
What did you think? All the fuss, the fire engines, this whole unusual day must have made an impression on you. But what? How?
You have, in your own particular way, a strong ability to feel with others. Not conventionally, in the expected manner, but strongly all the same. Sometimes your empathy can seem heedless because it is tactless. And you do not forget, you feel for a long time. About a year and a half after one of the special needs teachers at school had lost her husband you went up to her one day and said:
— Hey, Karin?
— Yes, Gabriel?
— It’s been such as long time now since your husband died that I think it’s time for us to find you a new one.
You meant well; Karin who knows you understood that. But you don’t understand, have no possibility of understanding that when one means well one can also do damage, as when you pick an itching scab off a wound that should be allowed to heal undisturbed. For people who don’t know you it isn’t easy to deal with a little boy who approaches in the street and asks, with genuine concern in his eyes:
— You’re so fat, why don’t you eat less?
You feel sorry for others and would like to help and comfort them — this is something you often express. You mean what you say and I don’t doubt that. But I am not sure why you mean it. Is it because you’ve learned that what one should do to be kind and nice is to help and show consideration, to be generous and comforting? Or does it come from an unselfish impulse in you, an altruistic need to offer support? I don’t know, and I probably never will know, and perhaps the questions are academic, irrelevant to the practicalities of our everyday life.
One day when we had been discussing your problems you fell silent for a moment before saying:
— Well at least I know what your problem is!
— Oh yes? And what’s that?
— You can’t eat apples and pears and nuts and stuff. That’s your problem.
It was, as far as it went, true. I do have an allergy, but it was a pretty unusual comparison to draw.
Half an hour later at the dinner table you returned to the subject:
— Hey, Dad, if I save until my piggy bank is full, d’you think I’ll be able to afford to buy some pills for you so that you can eat apples and pears and nuts and stuff? If there are such pills, that is?
You’d forgotten the original purpose of your savings — to buy the biggest diamond in the worLD.
BUT DO YOU KNOW WHAT regret is? Oh yes, when things disappear and you lose them, or when you break them and lose them in that way, you can feel regret. But your regret is always turned against circumstances, never something you yourself have done, and could have left undone. You have never broken a cup in a regrettable moment of inattention, nor ever taken your eye off a lost copper coin. The cup was wet and it slipped, or somebody slammed a door and gave you a start. The coin was so little and the house so big, and you had other things to do than to look for it, and it’s easy for the adults to say, but children aren’t good at remembering where they put things. In this way you channel your regret outside yourself and direct it at a world that never takes enough responsibility and is always open to blame.
— It’s your fault, you say to time and the wind, and don’t ask for a reply, don’t need a reply.
The only exception is in relation to your problems, which you don’t understand and therefore fear might be your own responsibility — at least if I’m to go by the seriousness in your voice on those occasions when you ask if they are your fault. All I can do then is repeat, Gabriel, that you’re completely innocent. Your problems are no more your own fault than are your fair curls or your strong muscles. You are born with them, created that way by nature.
It often doesn’t take more than that to placate you. As long as someone other than yourself is to blame — be it nature herself — then you can quietly put your worries behind you and carry on. You have weighed an opportunity to feel regret and guilt, and found it wanting.
I envy you this ability. Personally, I regret far too much.
On the other hand you largely lack the ability to generalize, to transfer experience and learning from one situation to another. Or more accurately: it is difficult for you to adapt to new situations the way the rest of us do, by using experiences from similar, but not identical, situations. Whereas life for us might be described as a succession of consecutive but discrete events, each one calling for a uniquely crafted response and a carefully adapted type of behaviour, you tend to approach most situations with a kind of standard behaviour. Your instinctive understanding of situations is underdeveloped, and you therefore make use of a narrow range of fairly crude patterns of response. It is as though you decide at once, when confronted by a situation, whether it calls for irritation, for example, or anticipation, joy, anger, or sympathy. And once the decision is made, you respond with an appropriate, standardized behaviour. If you find reason to feel annoyed, you will feel it as much, and in the same way, whether the provocation is small and unimportant, or large and serious. If it seems to you that sympathy is called for, then you are as effusive, whether it be to comfort a member of the family or a stranger in the street who seems unhappy to you.
To put it in another way, you lack a sense of proportion. You don’t dose the intensity of your behaviour and your feelings to accord with the individual situation, no more than you, for example, pitch the level of your voice to take into account how far away the person you’re talking to happens to be. Sitting just half a metre away from me at the dinner table, you m
ight address me with a volume that would be more appropriate if I were at the far end of the house. It is not because you lack the ability to distinguish between loud and quiet speech, but — as is so often the case — because you almost exclusively use your own criteria as the basis for your behaviour. Since you do not understand, or are unable to empathize with other people’s unspoken premises, motivations, and desires in a given situation, you ignore them and act as though your own premises, motivations, and desires are the only valid ones. So you raise your voice — not because it is necessary for me to hear you, but because you believe you have something important to say and that other voices therefore must either give way to yours or be drowned out, regardless of whether what they might have to say might also be important. Only if I expressly state that now you must listen, now I have something important to tell you, do you fall silent and listen. But on your own you are unable to “read” the situation, and gather from the expression on my face, the impatience in my voice and the raised eyebrows, or from all the countless hints that populate a social situation, that now it is someone else’s turn to speak.
Of all the many problems you have to face, my son, this is perhaps your greatest handicap. For even if in some given circumstance I explain to you that here you must show consideration for others, that social insight has disappeared by the time the next situation arises. That which you learned a moment ago has no transferable validity for a succeeding situation. Only if an identical situation arises are you able to use what you have learned. In a sense, you are a kind of social fundamentalist: each social occasion has, for you, its own absolute value and exclusive status, which make experiences gleaned from it unusable in the next. Whereas life for the rest of us is a steady stream of occasions that interlock with one another and allow us to accumulate appropriate patterns of behaviour, it seems to me that for you it consists rather of a series of discrete situations that must be approached individually, one after the other, and each time as though for the first time. I can only imagine how tiring and frustrating it must be, and how tempting it must seem to you to be spared the involvement and the empathizing with what others think and feel.
Somewhere Over the Sea Page 7