Sorrow and uncertainty and the urge to be sincere fight for possession of me, filling the moment with a gravity I cannot find a way out of. But you can.
— Dad, do you think I can take my treasures to my girlfriend when I’m grown up?
It is said in the same sober, wondering tone of voice, but for me it’s the best line of the day. Suddenly, all is harmless laughter and joking again: but of course you’ll take your treasures with you, all of them! Only an obstinate clot of memory lodged in my throat tells me that this is not over; this will never be over.
THE GREEN SHEEN OF LIGHT from the ceiling is slowly dwindling, the planets are about to go out. You don’t like the darkness, and I know that as soon as I have gone downstairs you’ll switch on the light above the bed, even though the door to the lit hallway is wide open. If you’ve fallen asleep before I go, at some point in the course of the night you’ll register the darkness, and a hand in search of renewed security will find the switch.
Right now my body is all the safety you need. You lie on your side, turned toward the wall as usual, with me as a shield against the world at your back. I sing “The earth is lovely” for you, very quietly, almost pure breathing, as I have done ever since you were very small. No doubt you think the psalm is pretty, but it is the repetition that calms you, that tells you that all is well because all is as it usually is.
From the corner of my eye I see Mom in the doorway watching us. She comes over to the bed, bends carefully over me, and kisses you on the cheek. You are too tired, you’re lying too comfortably to turn over and look at her, but as if from somewhere else we hear your voice:
— When I die and go to heaven, can we cuddle a bit more then?
We say nothing, but rest smiling hands on your head. What a fantastic boy, our eyes say to each other.
At bedtimes like these, at moments of grace like these, all has been overcome, all has been understood. Everything is a miracle. You are Gabriel and the whole world is your treasure chamber.
Sleep tight, my son. Tomorrow we’ll live on.
EPILOGUE
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Greetings from New York
Dear Gabriel:
I’m sitting on a bench in New York City. If the Atlantic Ocean weren’t so enormous we could have waved to each other — you from our garden back home and me from one of the skyscrapers that surrounds the park I’m sitting in.
Even though I know quite a few people in this city, I have to confess I feel quite lonely here. I see the people around me living their daily lives, and I sense more strongly than in other places that here I am only a visitor. Something about all the hurry, I imagine. Their daily life isn’t mine, and probably never could be. Not that most people aren’t nice and don’t do their best to make me feel at home, but somehow it doesn’t help. Sometimes their friendliness actually makes it more difficult: the more they try to make me feel welcome, the more obvious it is that I don’t belong here, that I am not a part of their reality.
I’ve had similar experiences many times before, when passing through realities that aren’t mine. And each time that happens, I think about how much more common and challenging such experiences are for you, how you struggle to feel at home even when you are at home or at school or in a shop or with friends — in those realities which by every standard must be called your own. And for the umpteenth time I ask myself: What does it really mean to feel at home in your own reality?
I still don’t have a good answer for you. In fact, in many ways I feel as though the answer slips away and becomes more elusive each time I ask: What is my reality? Where do I belong?
Perhaps I should simply stop asking. Perhaps it’s the question itself, this ceaseless and restless wondering, that prevents my feeling of alienation from ever ending. If we just stopped asking ourselves such questions, would everything fall into place? Would we find our place and resign ourselves to it, find contentment in it?
Forgive me. I know that difficult questions about the meaning of life aren’t what you want and expect from your father when he sends you greetings from New York. What you’d probably like best is for me to put the computer away and spend time buying cool clothes for you. And I promise I will; I’ll come back home with something you want. But first, let me tell you that, the way I see it, these questions are among your gifts to me. If it weren’t for you I wouldn’t have asked them to begin with, or at least not given them as much thought as I have. And believe me, son, I wouldn’t want to be without them. The sense of wonder you’ve given rise to is, at heart, the reality in which I feel most at home. Perhaps — but this is only a guess — because it ties me so closely to you.
You probably won’t remember, because you were so little at the time, but several years ago you and I passed through New York. You were perhaps two or three, and we didn’t know much about you other than that you were a beautiful miracle, bursting with life. It was in the days when the Twin Towers still stood and reached up into the skies before they were struck and fell. It was also before Mom and I knew that you had already been struck in your own way, and that you would fall all too easily when the world came charging at you with all its requests and demands, and you didn’t have enough strength and resistance to stay upright. Or rather — you had more than enough strength. What you lacked was the understanding of when to use it, and in what way, and how much. And so you fell, because you were confused and distressed and paralyzed in the face of a world that seemed constantly to attack you.
Now you’re turning into a tall, splendid young man, and this time we’re here together in another way: a literary festival that features writers from all over the world has invited me to talk about you and to read from this book. But I’ll tell you: it isn’t that easy, even though I’m the one who wrote the book and even though it’s about you, my son. Quite simply because the boy I was writing about no longer exists.
Time moves on, even for a boy described in a book. The years have matured him; he has developed intellectually and emotionally, and not least physically. He has acquired new interests, and encountered new challenges. The boy has turned into a young man. And so while I wait here, backstage — perhaps no more than ten minutes after we’ve spoken on the phone because you called to ask permission to stay the night at a friend’s house, having forgotten that I’m away — I have to remind myself that the public out there is expecting to hear about the person you were, not the person you are.
Like any other parent, I always think of you as I see you, developing day by day. But many people who know you first and foremost through the description of your problems seem almost to expect you to have stood still, to forever remain that lovely little boy who struggles to understand the world and to be understood by it. Or they assume that all those problems you’ve contended with must surely be resolved by now. You wouldn’t believe the number of times I’ve heard something along the lines of:
— Ah yes, aren’t you the one who had the son with all the difficulties? How’s he doing? Is everything okay now?
In both cases people seem to hope for the simplest possible answer — either that nothing has happened, and they can go on relating to you as though you were still that sweet, charming but heartbreaking Gabriel, or that you’ve “grown out of” your problems since the last time they heard about you.
But, of course, it isn’t like that. Simple answers are usually a product of wishful thinking. No one knows that better than you, having spent your whole life wishing you had another life.
Now I’m standing with some other writers in a lecture hall near the big park that lies in the centre of this “Big Apple,” as the Americans call their great city, the one you once took a tiny bite from. We are each going to say a few words and then read from our books. The others are well-known French and American writers, and I begin to doubt whether my little sto
ry about you will be of much interest to the two or three hundred people sitting here. Feeling nervous, I let my thoughts wander to more pragmatic questions.
I hope the sleepover goes okay and that Henni has remembered to give him money for Cokes and pizza, I think as the moderator opens the program and invites the first guest, a bestselling American writer of historical novels about love and war, onto the stage. And that he doesn’t let himself be tricked into spending it all on treating his friends.
Your friendships are still so new you’re willing to do anything to hang onto your recently acquired pals. Unfortunately, I sometimes suspect them of exploiting your keenness by, among other things, spending all your money. You are by nature wonderfully generous and unselfish, and if your kindness can also win friends for you then you’re quite willing to give away all you’ve got. Even though you’ve seen, on a number of occasions, so-called friends turn their backs on you the moment you have no more left to give.
I feel anger flaring up in me at the mere thought, and the urge to interfere long-distance from New York is kept in check only by a reluctant admonishment to myself that this is something Gabriel has to deal with on his own, this is something he’s going to have to go through and experience without help, this is something he has to learn to handle — just like every other young man. Even though you aren’t always like all the other young men, you’ve got to drill it into yourself to be like them, for you will — you will and you must! — learn to manage on your own.
Remember how many times I’ve said that to you? How often Mom and I have drummed into you that you must keep trying and never give up? Because the world takes no special account of you, dear Gabriel, any more than it does any other individual. It is you who must learn to accommodate yourself to the world, to distinguish between the happy times when it wishes you well, and the all-too-frequent occasions when it mows you down, uninterested, cynical, and unscrupulous. And if you ask me how to learn to tell the difference — well, I’ll have to send the question right back at you. Because at the heart of it lies a riddle: How is it possible to hold on to the good in yourself, when what the world seems to reward is the bad? It’s a riddle that three thousand years of philosophical and religious discussion has failed to solve — unless, perhaps, the solution lies in the act of questioning itself.
~~~
Ha! That’s easy for me to say, I think, as a salvo of thunderous applause greets the popular, bestselling author, who has just concluded a reading from his most recent and highly controversial novel about homosexual love during the American Civil War. What if, at the deepest level, he has already conceded defeat? What if he’s just playing along so as not to disappoint us?
Over the years you’ve grown disturbingly good at pretending, Gabriel. What used to be one of your foremost characteristics, your inability to dissemble or lie, you’ve gradually turned around and developed into something I suppose is a kind of survival strategy. The same world that ceaselessly charges at you with demands and expectations that seem so impossible to meet also offers you a wide and tempting range of potential solutions. Everywhere you turn you encounter apparently approved patterns of behavior that promise you all will be well, if only you make them your own and fashion yourself after them. Clothes, language, pastimes, attitudes, opinions — the world is rife with ready-made behavioral patterns, just help yourself. On top of that, popular culture’s incessant cultivation of intoxicants and states of intoxication offers you the best excuse to indulge in self-medication disguised as self-realization.
For most young people, all of this is a supermarket of identities from which they can freely pick and choose and combine in whatever way suits their personal preferences and dispositions. But for you it is much more than that: to you they seem like existential escape routes, short-cuts you can take to be like the others, to stop lacking what you believe the others have — to simply stop being Gabriel. And even though you probably suspect that this must be a fundamental impossibility, you try to achieve it in the only way you know how: by pretending.
That frightens me, I have to tell you. Dissimulation is just a pretty word for lying, and lying is a swamp that sucks all life and swallows it down, leaving nothing behind but darkness, emptiness, and fear. At the same time I understand you so well, and I wish I could support you in this effort too. But, my dearest boy, I cannot help you become someone other than who you are. That would imply betraying you, as fundamentally as a lie betrays. And it would be a betrayal of myself. I can only try to help you come to terms with the fact that you are Gabriel — unique, irreplaceable Gabriel.
Now, a surprisingly young French poet takes the stage. I would guess she’s about your age, clearly a precocious lyrical talent, but I can’t quite grasp her poetical intentions. This is not only due to her French way of lisping and burring her recitation of the English translation, but also because the slight and charmless figure I see in profile from my place in the wings radiates a singular absence which reminds me of you.
I know nothing about this young lady apart from the fact that, according to our moderator, she has already managed to publish a collection of poetry that has been highly praised by influential Parisian critics. But I have no problem imagining that the poetical cornucopia from which she seems to draw so effortlessly and playfully occupies much of the space that is, in others, set aside for the experiences of life. She must be extremely boring, I think to myself, the moment she leaves her keyboard and her poetical universe. Of course, I might be wrong, I might just be prejudiced. But still, in the life I imagine she’s chosen not to live I seem to recognize your longing, your insatiable thirst for all those experiences that you imagine a life in full demands of you.
Of course a lot of it is about girls and sex and love, and why shouldn’t it be? In this respect you’re no different from all the other young people feeling their way forward, as terrified as they are aroused by the mysteries of love and of sensual pleasure. But whereas most are more or less open to the randomness of these encounters, ready to follow an attraction wherever it may lead them, there are times when it seems as though you operate with a mental form, ticking off experiences as you complete them.
My heart is in my mouth as I write this, Gabriel, because I would hate for you to misunderstand me. There is nothing wrong with the way you go in search of love and girlfriends. To the contrary, the point is precisely that in this field there are no rules, nor any sets of instructions. I know you are painfully aware that social relationships between people are guided by complex and unwritten laws, which seem impossible to learn. But you mustn’t let this tempt you into believing that guidelines exist for what and how and how much you should feel. If you hear your friends describing, or perhaps even boasting of, the way in which they’ve done “it,” you mustn’t believe that they’re talking about some universal formula that you too should apply. No one chooses their feelings — that’s something you should know better than most, as vulnerable to them as you are.
However, we are to a large extent responsible for the actions our emotions give rise to, and in these choices it might be a good idea to observe certain basic rules. But I really don’t have to tell you about this either. You’ve had enough experience dealing with the consequences of letting your feelings take control, of acting on impulse because you were happy or angry or proud or sad — or some confusing mixture of all. And you have most definitely experienced the unfairness of others doing the same to you. How I have admired you all those times you’ve been the subject of gross abuse, come home with huge bruises on your arms and shoulders because bullies at school thought they could impress girls by beating you up, or met your pals at the mall only to be mocked and humiliated because their insecurity made them afraid to acknowledge you — the list is as long as it is painful. But each time it’s happened, you’ve let it pass, given them another chance, and shrugged off the degradation and the insult with a brave smile, even though you didn’t understand
why they treated you so cruelly.
It may well be admirable to bear the weight of literary fame at an early age, as the girl on stage is doing now, responding with studied self-assurance to the audience’s enthusiastic bravissimos. But if you ask me, that’s nothing compared to the unflinching way you carry your life, each and every day, and all too often at the risk of being booed off the stage.
Now I hear our names, and it feels as if we’re being summoned from the playground to the principal’s office because we’ve done something wrong and are about to be reprimanded. Naturally, I’m nervous and tense. It’s one thing to sit hidden behind a screen and write about you, but to stand exposed on stage and talk about you — about us?
Yes, dammit! If you can do it, then I can do it too. And what’s more, it’s you I’m talking to; this is all about you. So listen:
I start with a few words about your problems, what typifies them, and what it was like to be told by the doctors that our son was born with certain difficulties he would have to struggle with all his life, but for which they — the doctors — unfortunately couldn’t give us any real explanation. They couldn’t say anything definite about the causes of the problems, and they were uncertain about the degree of hardships we might expect them to cause you. The only thing they were certain about was that your problems had a name, and so they gave you a so-called diagnosis.
Naturally it came as a shock, perhaps less for Mom, who suspected something was wrong, than it was for me. It was as though I refused to believe there could be anything wrong with my son. Instead I comforted myself with the thought that you would develop at your own pace and in your own time, and that all would work out in the end. It was, I told myself, just a question of being patient, of letting time and maturity work for you. But then we got the diagnosis, and there was no longer any point in protesting.
Somewhere Over the Sea Page 13