by Adam Roberts
‘Sol, Leave Mommy Alone,’ scolded Hope, with audibly capitalised earnestness, happy for the opportunity to pull rank on his brother.
‘I’ll tell you why,’ said Gradi, stopping, and dropping to her haunches to bring her face a little below the level of her younger son’s. ‘Shall I tell you for why?’
Sol, wounded by maternal rejection, replied only with an intense and wordless stare.
‘It’s because I’ve a baby inside me. Inside my body, just underneath my tummy, I’ve a womb, and inside the womb is a baby. Have you done babies at school?’
‘No,’ said Sol, sulkily.
‘We have,’ cried Hope, gleeful. ‘We did it in the summer. I know all about babies.’
Gradi took Sol by the shoulders and drew him to her. ‘The baby is very small at the moment,’ she said. ‘He’s curled up in my womb, and if you smash into me you might hurt him. OK?’
‘OK,’ said Sol, even sulkier.
‘I know you didn’t mean to hurt the baby, and I’m not angry with you,’ said Gradi. ‘But we all need to take care of him. One day he will be born, sometime next year — ’
‘After Christmas?’ put in Hope, whose perspective of the future was closed off by that glittering imminence, crowded with those presents to which he was looking forward.
‘That’s right. And then you’ll have a brother - a younger brother for both of you. You’ll be three little boys, instead of two little boys.’ Sol perked up at this a little, as if anticipating wat it might be like to have a new-printed member of the family, releasing him from the burden of littlestness. But Hope bridled. ‘I’m not a little boy,’ he objected. ‘I’m nearly nine.’
The sky overhead had blakened with unnatural suddenness, even for a late-year Suomi dusk. It was a raincloud, crow-coloured and wide as the sky, and it straight away began to unload on us; irregular splotchy drops at first, sounding in the darkness like an impossibly quik succession of eggs being broken in a pan, but then, without crescendo, a torrent. Shrieking and laughing we all ran through this nailstorm, along the lamplit street and into the first restaurant we encountered. In seconds we had become soaked. The staff brought us hand towels as we occupied a table by the window, laughing and padding ourselves dry. The boys ordered gammon. Gradi and I had real vegetables, a spread of six different sorts, steamed and boiled; we urged Kirsi to have the same, but she insisted it was too extravagant, and instead ate a nondescript shed-grown hotpot. The quik dash for shelter had perked a buzz out of our group, and we talked excitedly about this and that, Kirsi included. There was an antique piano being discreetly played in the corner of the restaurant, its enormous lid propped at forty-five degrees like the rudder of a sea-ship: Bach and Mozart and Boettcher, melodies and arpeggios weaving sine-cosine through the air. It was delicately digestive music. The waiting staff came and went. Rain chattered at the windows, passed off, then chattered bak against the glass. The lamp over the restaurant entrance put a tiny golden crescent on every raindrop clinging to the outside of that window, and after their food the boys crouched down against the glass and followed the trembling descent of a hundred drops, tracing the downward wiggle with their fingers.
This was our last time together as a family. But wat does that phrase mean, precisely, I mean, as a family? We were rarely familiar, in all the times we had been together. There was a single decade - less than a decade, at the fag-end of an exhausted century. Then came the war, and everything changed. But the tightness of chronological focus simply failed to generate a correlative tightness of familial focus. Nor have I the right to accuse Gradi of being an absentee mother, or neglectful. I, like her, was an only child. Perhaps I have spent too much of my life looping round and round the density of my own self, insufficiently attentive to the needs of others. More, I find it hard to see inside the minds of other people, to watch the world as others watch it. Most of all, even the many years of marriage to Gradi has not gifted me the ability to see through her face into her mind. She is as much a blank to me, her husband, as she is to the millions who have followed her career on screen, through news and doc and dramaticonstruction. Her manner, her breathtaking self-possession, her charisma, the sheer now! and now! and now! of her presence, working a room, flashing from person to person, the ability to mould people around her, to anticipate: all that is generally accessible. But do even I know wat swirled through the vesicles of her brain when she lay, tight in a sleeping bag hooked to a wall, in that interlude between wake and sleep? Doubts, anxieties, uncertainties, second-thoughts; perhaps she had all those. If so, I never saw them. And perhaps she was truly without even the most minor self-reproach; perhaps the inside of her mind truly was smooth and flawless and pure. Much of the practical process of raising the boys was subcontracted to a series of childcare professionals; that’s frequently the way with the wealthy. But I was not as absent as was Gradi, and that simple fact gives me more solace, now, than you might think. I did play with my boys; I did take them to the monster-theatre, to the cinema. We did watch 3nimations and share buckets of sweets together. I did go to at least some of their school events.
And, looking bak, I remember a seeming unending series of conversations with my boys. That was the period of parenthood I enjoyed most; between the frustratingly dumb and maladroit period of the baby years, and the insolently self-reliant period of teens, there was a glorious summerish flowering of years when the two of them were old enough to talk to and play with, but when they were still unthinkingly reliant on the mere existence of parent, that object without which they would be unable to work through the stiky medium of existence, day by day.
Sol developed an early interest in sports, particularly sports of which statistics were a part. But the earliest conversations I can remember with Hope were always about the Uplands. Both of the boys had been up a few times, but never for more than a day at a time. But Hope wanted to be there all the time.
‘Why can’t we live in the Uplands?’ We had this conversation often.
‘Because you and Sol are too little.’
‘I’m nine, I’m nearly nine.’
‘That’s still too little.’
Hope had a distinctive inflection of the generic aow of childish disappointment, which he now deployed. ‘But I want to live there all the time!’
‘I know you do. But your bones are still growing. Growing bones need gravity.’
‘Madame Hakkunen says that bones need calcium.’
‘They need calcium too. But they need gravity. If you lived up there all the time, your arms and legs wouldn’t grow properly. Your spine, too. You’d grow up to be a cripple.’
‘I wouldn’t mind.’
‘But you would mind, if it happened to you! And anyway, I’d mind. It would mean I’d been a bad parent.’
‘When can I live up there? Next year?’
‘No, not next year either. You need to be fully grown: sometime in your late teens.’
‘When’s that?’
‘It will depend, won’t it? But late teens means eighteen, nineteen, maybe even twenty.’
Hope contemplated this impossible-to-imagine stretch of time with a sweetly beautiful look of genuine astonishment on his face. ‘But that’s ages! I’ll be dead by then!’
‘Time goes quiker than you think,’ I said. It was one of the reasons I loved talking with the boys at that age, the way they absorbed even my rankest banality as a distillation of the wisdom of the ages. Although on this occasion Hope’s mind was in combative mode. ‘No, it doesn’t,’ he said, with finality. ‘Time takes ages.’
I hugged him, because (I think) his words had magically reconnected me, momentarily, with that childlike slow-motion of existence, when single afternoons were deserts to drag oneself wearily across, or jungles to be fought excitedly through, and hours and hours and hours was a criminal sentence as long as decades. It is formed, perhaps, of the indiscrimination of childhood, that elasticity of time. Children have not yet learned the adult habits of selection and on-the-hoof ed
iting, the dismissal of ninety per cent of our lives as not relevant to the task in hand. To a child every atom of existence is swept into the broad net of their senses, relevant or irrelevant, and the pressure, like solar wind, functions as a kind of palpable drag, slows them to a pace of time-known like a leaf uncurling. ‘Time gets faster as you grow up,’ I said, trying, in my clumsy way, to share this great truth with the boy. But of course this was a concept beyond his ability to understand.
Sol, all through this exchange, was absorbed in watching a rollball game on the screen. He was so much more curled up in himself, mentally speaking, than his brother. If the positions had been reversed - if it had been Hope watching the screen whilst Sol was talking to me - then Hope would have been unable to restrain himself from butting into the talk, eager to straining-point to share his opinion, to know wat was going on, fidgeting and hopping. But Sol was uninterested in things that did not directly impinge on him, and his concentration was such that very little did impinge.
Sol’s mode of being in the world, his natural, unlearned hermeticism, would often catch me unawares. He was small, sheathed like an atom in tight little layers of indeterminacy which the external observer could not expect to penetrate. Hope was a completely different style of youngster; more sprawling, out-reaching, arboreal. Hope sprouted upwards in height with an almost brutal suddenness and, unused to his newly extruded body, seemed forever to be falling over; such that the ground, with a barber’s practised firmness and swoop, was always scraping grids of skin off his knees and elbows. Whenever this happened, inside or outside, Hope had no compunction about bursting into hysterical tears. Even into his late teens, in fact; at a time when most children have learned to handle their emotions with some circumspection, there seemed to be no border between wat Hope felt and wat he projected to the world. A thumb caught in a door or a heavy lid, say, would bash out promiscuous tears and prolonged little yelping cries that combined physical anguish with a hopeless sort of sense of betrayal, as if he couldn’t quite believe that the universe had been so cruel to him. This reaction was as common at eighteen as it was at eight; it pained me, to be honest, to see a young man bursting into childish tears at trivial causes. That is my most enduring memory of Hope - even now. He was forever rushing about, skidding or banging himself; forever running to Kirsi or to me with his face blotchily plumped and reddened with tears.
Sol was quite different. Do you remember the fashion for powerbikes? They were everywhere in the EU during the ’90s, and I believe they were popular in the US also. Parents bought them because the advertising assured us the motor could only be charged by the pedalling of little legs, and charged therefore only up to a modest level. But naturally children found ways to circumvent the inbuilt safety features. They quikly discovered that leaning the bike at about forty degrees whilst someone took a portion of the weight of the bak wheel, and pedalling furiously so that the wheel half-slid and half-stuk, could charge up the little cablewire motor to a considerably enhanced level. Then, instead of moving along a fraction above normal cycling speeds, the intrepid child could zip about at twice, or even more, the usual pushbike speed. One summer Sol, with some of his schoolfriends, supercharged their bikes using this method, and Sol went caroming along the traffic-free Helsinki streets, scaring pedestrians, his face a mask of silent concentration, until the inevitable collision. The bike was bent in the middle through nearly ninety degrees; it looked like a 3-D model of some notional 4-D hyperbike. Sol himself came limping home, supported by one shamefaced friend. Kirsi was cross with him for putting himself in danger, and for wreking the bike, which relieved me of the dutiful need to pretend anger when all I felt was a cowardly relief. I asked him if he were alright and, through lips that kept snapping shut between words, he insisted he was fine, and limped upstairs to lie down. His colourless face should have alerted us as much as his demeanour - because, in fact, his thighbone was broken, a very nasty fracture we later learned. But his childish reticence meant that we did not take him to the hospital until the following morning. It still astonishes me; he lay on the bed in agony all night without coming to me. Wat went through his mind? I have no idea. Did he expect the pain to go away? Did he think he could conquer it by sheer childish will? When he was still white-faced in the morning, and unable to get out of bed, I called medics; and rode with him to the hospital, more amazed than guilty. He was in a thigh-sheath for a month whilst the pharmakos prompted his healing.
Klara
When the boys asked after their mother, as they did often (before, as teenagers, they learned a more studied indifference to their maternal origins) I tried to be truthful. I told them she was very busy, in the Uplands, working hard. I told them that she loved them, and saw them as much as she could, but that the work she was doing was very very important. When they asked, ‘Wat work?’ I said that she was helping create a new nation, a whole country up in the sky. The boys were relatively unimpressed with this.
But Klara, a frequent guest in the house, knew how to hold the attention of her two grandchildren. Her version of Gradi’s life chimed with their understanding of wat a life should be. This is wat she told them:
‘Have you heard about America? America is a big country, over the sea. Now, a while ago, before you boys were born, this country committed a crime against our family. They sent an assassin - do you know wat an assassin is?’
Wide-eyed shakings of the head.
‘An assassin is a person who kills other people for money. Well, they sent such a person, and she killed my father — your great-grandfather. Murdered him in the Uplands, above the sky. It was a terrible crime, and it has scarred our family. All of us are duty-bound to revenge ourselves upon this crime. Do you see?’
‘How did the sassin do it?’ they asked.
And she told them the story, and they sat circle-eyed in amazement. She must have told them the story a thousand times, and it sank very deeply into their childish beings, their fluttery little souls, their intensities of excitement and resentment and sorrow. It occurred to me sometimes that it was ill-advised of me to give my boys (not mine, I know, must you remind me?) so largely over to their grandmother. She was a mad old woman in many senses. But I was distracted, and Gradi was absent almost all the time, and Klara loved her grandchildren: she spent whole days with them, entering into the spirit of their childish games perfectly, her own childishness (something she had never outgrown) serving her so very well. The boys loved her.
On the rare occasions when Gradi was in the house as well, Klara would try to provoke her. ‘She always seems to be leaving, doesn’t she, your mother?’ she would say to the boys. ‘Always leaving! Running away to the Uplands.’
‘Don’t tell them that, Mother,’ Gradi would say, crossly.
But the boys were snuggled on Klara’s lap, all three of them settled in the sofa with the screen showing a 3nimation, and they egged her on. ‘Tell us, Granny! Tell us!’
‘I’ll tell you something that not many people know,’ said Klara, with each of her arms around a different boy, ‘When she was a girl, not much older than you are now — ’
‘Do you mean not much older than me?’ interrupted Hope, ‘or not much older than Sol? I’m older than Sol you know.’ Sol didn’t say anything.
‘Not much older than both of you,’ said Klara. ‘Do you know wat she said, about the Uplands? I’ll tell you, she hated that place. She told me Uplanders are all criminals and bank robbers and murderers, and they’ve run away from the world, and it’s proper to despise them.’ Klara cackled, and taking their cue from that the boys shrieked with forced hilarity. ‘She used to hate the Uplands!’ Klara continued. ‘And now she can’t stay away from there!’ Gradi returned her attention to the flimsy she was reading, contenting herself with tutting at Klara’s foolishness.
‘Mummy’s silly,’ said Hope, overexcited. But this was too much for Sol. He disengaged himself from Klara’s arm and left the room, silently.
‘You’ve upset your brother,’ I s
aid — mildly enough, I think.
‘He’s stupid!’ said Hope, flushed, his mouth a ∩. All the hilarity had flipped into distress and accusation. ‘He always spoils everything. He’ll make my life horrid now - he will. He’ll get at me all day now, I know he will.’
‘How do you mean, get at you?’ asked Klara.
‘He’ll say,’ said Hope, with tears starting to brim from his eyes, ‘that I shouldn’t call Mummy silly, and he’ll go on and on about it, on and on. He doesn’t think Mummy is silly. He loves Mummy.’
Gradisil got up from the table and came over to the sofa and collected the boy from Klara’s lap. ‘But you love Mummy too, don’t you?’ she said, in a soft voice.
‘Of course I do, Mummy, of course I do. But not like Sol does.’ And that was when the tears really started pumping out of his little eyes.
twelve.