Child Wonder

by Roy Jacobsen

  After crossing the bay we clambered out and sat on a smooth rock in a foreign country and looked back, at the sculpture to all mothers who was still standing there, so tiny, transmitting her warmth and warnings and visions of horror and all the things a mother should beam through space. I felt my smile extending across my face and stood up and waved to her and said:

  “Look now.”

  “What at?” Boris asked.

  “She’s not waving back,” I said.

  “Eh?” said Boris.

  “She’s angry,” I said, sitting down.

  Boris pondered, looking at me with a new smile because he felt the same as I had felt as we were crossing the equator, namely, that here something had happened, not to lay it on too thick, that would last and outlive us both. But we were in the mood to lay things on thick that day, that summer, we laid it on thicker than ever before. So when Boris said “Come on” for a third time, what else could I do but follow, out of everyone’s sight into the scrub, Boris’ world, into the immense wilderness of gnarled trees and bushes, a slumbering pyrotechnic display of ravines and bird song that pounded your ears, and sun and shade and heat and cold, along a path only Boris knew, until I got to know it as well, for this was indeed the realm of the dragon, and the eagle owl, with a fine talcum-white dust sticking to our wet feet, making them look like bones, a powder that was found only on this path, up to a mountain overhang where all of a sudden everything became brighter and another bay revealed itself fifty metres beneath us, with a single orange tent.

  Boris said we should lie down and wriggle towards the cliff edge. Down below I spotted a person on an airbed beside the tent, a woman lying and sunbathing topless, with enormous copper-brown tits, and she wasn’t wearing any shorts, either, I realised a bit later.

  “She’s there every day,” Boris whispered.

  I stared. There was no-one else to be seen. Just this overwhelming creature lying there as still as a corpse or fast asleep, looking like nothing I had ever seen before and striking chords within me I had no inkling existed.

  “My brothers call her F.T.B., full to bursting,” Boris said.

  “She’s old,” it struck me.

  “At least fifty, yes,” Boris said knowledgeably. “But you can’t see so well from here. Shall we go closer?”

  “No-oo …”

  We lay on our stomachs studying F.T.B. It was impossible to take your eyes off her. It made no difference that she was old or a long way down or stone dead, she grew and grew the more we gawped, tanned and attractive, a stranded whale in the electric sunshine.

  “My brothers say she knows we watch her,” Boris whispered.

  “What?”

  “Yes, and she likes it.”

  “Eh?”

  “Wait till she goes for a swim, then you’ll see.”

  We lay waiting for F.T.B. to go for a swim. She took her time. Not that it mattered much. But at last she woke up and grabbed her wrist-watch beside the airbed and checked it, then brushed some invisible particles of dust off her stomach and sat up and was even bigger, looked around and brushed something off her shoulders and thighs, pollen I supposed, or insects, after which she at last got to her feet and stood with her hands on her hips like a lazy afterthought and sent her gaze on one languid, not-expectant circuit after another around the steaming summer landscape.

  Then she took the first step down towards the sea, waggling unsteadily over shells and barnacles and sharp stones, her arms out to the side like stabilising wings and her back to us, onto the furthest rock, where she paused again, took another look around, across the sea and the land and the trees and the ridge, stroked her shoulders again, bent down to test the water, and now we had her in side view.

  “She looks everywhere,” Boris whispered in a very low voice. “Except here.”

  “Eh?”

  “Look at her – she never looks this way!”

  I still didn’t understand. And now Boris began to be impatient, said she was here every summer, and it wasn’t just he and his brothers who knew.

  “Look.”

  I cast my eyes around and registered that the spot we were lying on was flattened, like under a tent.

  “Adults come here, too,” Boris said solemnly. “Men.” “Who?”

  “Well … the warden anyway.”

  “Hans?!”

  “Mm. But I don’t think my uncle knows about it.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know …”

  I had the impression Boris regretted bringing up his“uncle”.

  But now F.T.B. allowed herself to be swallowed up by the water, and that was another eye-opener, for, like whale spotters from a crow’s nest, we could see down into the sea, through a huge, green magnifying glass which made her bright and sharp like a broad-winged bird, swimming out at an inert, geological tempo, stroke by stroke, breast. And indeed as she turned soundlessly onto her back and fixed her gaze onto us, at that moment, I was struck by the familiar feeling that either she was blind or we were invisible. A twin-domed cathedral of rubber floated before us below. Still with this blind gaze directed at us. And something happens to you when someone spots you – you see yourself from the outside, your individual strangeness, that which is only you and moves in only you, but which nonetheless you have not known, such that it is never you yourself who is revealed but someone else, an imitation, a criminal, before however you have to admit you have had this within you the whole time, you just didn’t know about it, until it was too late, but by then you have also become someone else.

  “We have to go and let the crabs out,” Boris whispered, breathless, and wriggled silently backwards onto the patch of flattened grass. “I always let the crabs go.”

  14

  But this summer could also be called the summer with Freddy 1 even though nothing went according to plan, for which I was also prepared, I thought. For two days after Boris had shown me F.T.B., he came up to our tent and took stock, nodding in acknowledgement, then went to my mother and introduced himself as if he were a man of twenty-eight.

  “I’m Boris,” he said, looking her in the eye.

  Mother, taken aback, gave a flustered smile and I decided I would have to try that one myself some time, to achieve a similar effect.

  Mother had spent the last two days telling me off – for crossing the equator – and comforting Linda, who had discovered she had been swimming in salt water and wanted to go home. In addition, I had been rapped over the knuckles for not picking up her new signals; the thing was, Hans was still dropping by, up at the camp site and down on the beach, with some new rule or golden nugget of advice, and he took his time about it, and Mother considered it my duty to stay close to her although she felt no need to explain to me why, it was my duty to understand.

  “Do you see?”

  “Er … mm, yes …”

  “So why did you leave me then?”

  Now she was looking down at Boris as if he were the type of son she would have liked to have had.

  “I’ve been told to tell you the shop’s opening in half an hour,” Boris said, “and that you can buy smoked sausages and bread and something to put on top, I don’t know its name … liver sausage, at least that’s what it was last time.”

  “Oh?” said Mother, instantly on the alert again. “Who told you?”

  “No-one. I told myself.”

  She stood eyeing him, impressed, then turned to me with a rather different expression.

  “In that case I think you should have this, Finn,” she said, taking out her purse and giving me a shiny tenner. “Go down and see what you can find. And not ice cream!”

  “They don’t have any ice cream.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Yes, they don’t have much of anything, and I’m not sure children are allowed to shop there.”

  “So you’re saying I should come along?”

  “It’s probably best, yes.”

  Mother got Linda out of the tent, where she had barri
caded herself in, waiting for the holiday and the salt water to pass, and we walked Indian file down the narrow serpentine path to the camp site, Mother seizing the opportunity to ask Boris how he knew where we were staying. He didn’t reply, but reacted in a way which indicated that there wasn’t much on this island about which Boris was not informed.

  When we arrived at the quay we sat down and dangled our feet in the water while Mother went on to the mysterious shop, which in fact was no more than a grey house situated on the slope where the cart track met the path from the quay. We chucked pebbles into the sea, and Linda again moaned about salt in the water.

  “Yes, and a good thing too,” Boris said airily.

  She sent him a quizzical look. “Yes, you float better like that,” he said, studying her.

  Linda’s mouth seemed to be saying “Eh?” “Yes, you can’t drown in salt water,” he explained.

  Linda glanced from Boris up to me. I nodded. And Boris sat watching her attentively, as though on the verge of making a discovery, an expression I had seen on several faces over the last six months and had never liked, this was a hurdle we would have to cross.

  “Can’t you swim?” he asked.

  “Course I can,” she answered.

  “What’s the problem then?”

  “Eh?”

  “Well, you don’t have to drink it, do you?”

  Linda looked back at me with that invisible shadow of a smile which could make concrete hover.

  “Can she swim or can’t she?” Boris said to establish some definitive clarity on the matter. I nodded and Linda said:

  “Mm.”

  “Alright,” said Boris with indifference, and threw some gravel into the water, squinting across the sea and down into the quay, and scratching his nose and a long-healed graze on his left knee for no reason, so I knew for certain that we were over the hurdle, and that he too was wondering what we should get up to next, just as I do when I have reached the tipping point between having such a great time I am almost exploding and beginning to get bored.

  Then Mother returned, shaken to the core of her soul, I could see from her aggressive gait, with a grey bag she was trying with little success to conceal under a blouse she had brought along from our camp site, which, by the way, we had nicknamed Daisy after a fairy-tale cow, that was Linda’s idea.

  “What a place,” she said, sitting down.

  “Yes, they’re not really allowed to sell anything here,” Boris said.

  “And then we’re supposed to hide the food. Well, I mean to say!” Mother said, opening the bag, which contained two kilos of smoked sausages, a bunch of carrots, two loaves and half a kilo of margarine which had already gone soft in the sunshine. Since both Linda and I love smoked meat, she abandoned all her principles and gave us a sausage each, after first taking the skin off one with her long nails.

  “How about you, Boris, have you had breakfast yet?”

  “Er, no,” Boris said. “My uncle doesn’t have breakfast.”

  “Goodness. Would you like one?”

  Boris took a sausage, too, and ate it with the skin on, like me, the sound of crisp skin cracking between front teeth, and mouths filling with the cold smoked taste which is both hard and soft and beats even roast pork hands down. Mother had one too, with the skin peeled, like Linda. When we were finished we took another one. And we had a good laugh about that, us sitting there, not giving two hoots about Parliament and the Government, and ate as many illegal sausages as we wanted.

  Then we leaned back on our elbows and dangled our feet, the smell of seaweed and forest and pollen and Nivea teasing our nostrils, the quiet buzz of insects, and we said nothing, which is very unusual for us, we normally prattle non-stop, it struck me in all the silence, then Mother mumbled with closed eyes that we could sit here for ever, and we smiled, but the boat will be here soon, she went on, it’s Saturday.

  “Saturday?” I awoke.

  “Yes,” she said with a strange sigh, which I knew meant a change of rhythm, and she drew up one knee and leaned over to share a secret with us, Boris too, staring down at her nails as she made small trails in the soft, grey woodwork, telltale letters. “There’s something I have to say.”

  Briefly, what had to be said was that Marlene and Jan were coming over on this boat, you remember Jan, don’t you, from last Tuesday?

  We nodded.

  Mother would be catching the same boat to town and staying there for a few days, to run a few errands, which is our standard term for activities which are either boring or secret or embarrassing or necessary or all of the above. But when Linda’s jaw fell, and Mother nudged it back into place, and beamed: “You’d like to be with Marlene, wouldn’t you?” I knew that this was in fact not only what was going to happen, it had also been well planned, it was the continuation of a story that started on the Town Hall quay, or at the restaurant, maybe before that too, Mother had of course concocted a plan with the one person in whose hands she could leave us, Marlene.

  It also struck me that without Boris and the island and all the other things that had happened of late, which I scarcely understood, only that they were growing in significance inside me, I might well also have started to blubber.

  Now, I didn’t even ask what the errands were that she had to run, nor did I raise any kind of objection, and she scrutinised my face with curiosity. But I just stared northwards, over the bay, where sure enough the boat hove into view, like a floating black-and-white Liquorice Allsort, appearing at the right time in the right place, as in a film, where everything turns up on cue and all you have to do is open your mouth – and receive. Now we could also hear the sound of the engine, iron and pistons and banging, the muffled echo from the ridge and the forest behind us which merged with the lapping of the sea and the insects and the silence that reigned for once in the family, a family which fortunately on this occasion had been enlarged by one, Boris.

  He got to his feet and ran barefoot up the quay and expertly caught the mooring rope the boatman threw to him. And Hans, who had also made an appearance, nodded assent to Boris, it went without saying, Boris who knew these things like the back of his hand, who helped Hans afterwards with the rickety gangplank and stood to attention like a naked doorman, showing the stream of new, clothed summer visitors the way to paradise, novices and veterans alike, we could recognise them now by their style, the former in a state of bewilderment, identical to our own when we arrived a mere four days ago, and those who were in the know, the fight for territory, off at top speed towards the island’s splendours.

  Jan also turned out to be one of the veterans. He came ashore with more luggage than an American emigrant and exchanged a few old-hand pleasantries with Hans before coming over to us, with Marlene, who was wearing slightly less make-up today and who once again lifted up Linda and hugged her and remembered me just in time while Boris repeated his party piece of the morning and said “I’m Boris”, which I decided was perhaps not such a brilliant number after all.

  I stood back a bit, to be frank, while Mother went up to the tent to fetch her bag. I admired the huge food hamper that Jan had brought, as well as a large plastic-covered creamy-white box whose apparent purpose was to keep our food cool; there was dry ice in it which Jan had got from an ice cream company, he said, and showed us a block of ice with smoke coming off it, which he claimed would last for many days before melting, if it stayed in the box, mind you, but by then he would have had a fresh batch sent over by boat, because he had contacts in Diplom-Is.

  “This is in fact a genuine ice box,” he said with a proprietary air, placing a small, tanned hand on the wavy lid.

  Yes, indeed. And it had to be transported to the tent by cart, which we borrowed from Hans who had begun to address Mother in formal terms and who said, as she passed, he hoped he would see her again soon, fru Jacobsen. Mother was more concerned with hugging Linda goodbye, and so on. Besides, I was standing there brewing up a storm. She could see that.

  “You know I love you, Finn,”
she said. “Whether I get a hug or not.”

  I suppose this was meant to be a kind of olive branch to someone who had seriously begun to consider what was appropriate and what was not, but instead it was said in such an embarrassingly shrill voice across the quay and the crowded ship’s deck that there was no hug, no nothing. So she repeated how much she loved me, just in case some deaf ninny had not caught it the first time round, and went on board and waved from next to the stern in her flowery dress, which should have made me smell a rat this morning; on the island she wore a bikini top and a bathing costume, a dress was town-wear, a uniform, to be worn in shoe shops and on tarmac streets, which she put on only when Linda and I would not be with her, as the boat chugged northwards again.

  Now it was me standing and staring after someone disappearing over the horizon. Of course I could have jumped in and swum after her, I would have bloody caught up with the crappy boat as well, I imagine, I did at least consider the idea, but rejected it and followed the others up to Daisy and just as tears were about to flow from my stupid mug I felt that they weren’t going to come after all. The tears remained inside me. It wasn’t so bad. Or that was how bad it was. All this was so new, it had come in stages or like small landslides over the last six months, as if to sort of hammer it home that the distance between Mother and me was growing and growing, as if guided by an invisible hand hard at work to create a final farewell.

  Then the tears did well up. But no good ever comes of crying; if there is anyone who should have known that, it was me, for ever-watchful Marlene heard it, of course, and turned and crouched down and said: