Somewhere Over the Sea (2 page)

Your sister once said that if you wear glasses you have to take them off in order to describe them. She was quite right, and the same goes for people. No one can see themselves or understand themselves alone, without distance. Therefore I want to tell you about us, about our life, about the problems you face and that we are not always able to help you with. I will attempt to explain to you what is good, and what is difficult, and I shall see if I can put grief into words. I'll try to describe you, Gabriel, you and us, and our landscape. Maybe it'll help us to understand a bit more of where we are, and why, and who.

I have thought that this might be dangerous, for now and then it's possible to close one's eyes and hope that the hurt will be gone when one opens them again, and if I write about these things that will no longer be possible. It will be like revealing a secret. But then I have thought that there's really no point in keeping secrets alone, because in that case there's no one to talk to about them. And if there's no one to talk to about one's secrets, no one to share them with, it would be as if they didn't exist, and what are we to do with secrets that don't exist?

CHAPTER TWO

T
rees don't grow where we live. They don't want to, I think, or they can't, our place is too exposed, the weather is too harsh. Trees are by nature slow and deliberate, they feel uncomfortable when there's noise and urgency and storms around them and they aren't left to grow in peace.

Out to sea, beyond the island where we've built our home on a little incline just a stone's throw from the water's edge, the North Atlantic lies open all the way to America. This naked landscape is no home for trees, hardly even for crooked, rusty bushes, heather, and peat. Farther inland, where the gusts of wind are not powerful enough to carry the salty ocean spray, where hills and small valleys, farms and settlements provide shelter, the trees gather in large and small huddles, like members of some silent, erect tribe. We visit them from time to time, the leaf tribe and the bark tribe, they live less than ten to fifteen minutes away, but that's already another world, one in which the sea sounds like a tall tale, a geography in which the coast's openness and overwhelming light are replaced by something that is closed and dark. For people who live out by the sea, the woods can seem cramped. A bit like in town, you know, where you often think it's difficult to find room for yourself.

But in the corner of our garden out by the sea, where south meets west, pressed up against the low fence, a lone tree stands and obstinately insists on its right to be a different tree. I don't know its name, or if there is a name at all for trees of this tenacious kind. I don't even know if you could say that it stands, at least not upright, in the way of trees. On one side of its trunk this tree is polished smooth by the wind, and it falls back, bows before the superior nor'westerly with a mixture of compliance and resolution that conveys great dignity.

All the branches point to the southeast. They strain and stretch, long and sinewy and horizontal in their flight from the wind. In winter, when the light disappears in the middle of the day and the branches are black and barren, they look like old, twisted witch's fingers grabbing at an eastern wind that won't be caught. In autumn, when the leaves are dry but have still not let go, they are wriggling tentacles, rattling snakes straining to break free of the firm hold of the trunk. In summer, when they bulge in green abundance and hum with birdsong and the murmur of insects, they are a lush, cooling bunch of self-enclosed, mystical life. And in spring, just before they burst into leaf, when they can but don't want to but must, they are pure longing, outstretched hands, refusal and will at one and the same impossible time.

Trees are bearers of big, ancient secrets, Gabriel. One should honour them as one honours the oldest and the very young, for without them one becomes rootless.

WHEN I SPEAK
TO YOU
about nature in this way, as though it had human feelings and thoughts, it's called anthropomorphism. Many think that anthropomorphism is inappropriate and should be avoided when one talks about nature, and in principle you would have agreed completely, for you don't like the mixing-together of things that don't belong together. But, in the case of our weather and our landscape, other rules apply. They are so intimately related to us that we easily forget ourselves and fall into conversation with them. It would seem strange to write to you about the nature around us
as though it were not full of properties, and I think it would seem strange for you to read. We would both find it duller and less sociable than the one we deal with daily — less believable, almost.

Once, during a lengthy stay in hospital, you got tired of sitting in the ward all the time and announced that you wanted to go for a walk. Do you remember? It was windy and rainy, and the staff were resisting, but you insisted with an indisputable argument:

— But don't you see, I'm a child of nature?

And then the two of us went out into the rain, walked down to the pond, and fed the ducks and talked to them for a while.

THERE IS A
CONNECTION
between all things, Gabriel.

On the night you were born, February snow fell heavy over Oslo. It was six months before we moved out to the sea. Your mother, my Henni, had had a difficult pregnancy. You were her fourth, and the anticipation of at last meeting you was all the greater because we hoped that the birth would release not only you, but her too, from physical distress and worry.

As she lay in the delivery room and it was a matter of minutes rather than hours, the birth had been induced, I was called away. There was a telephone call for me in the duty room. At the other end, from another world in the west of the country,I was told that your great-grandmother had passed away. Granny was dead.

I returned to the birth and could not say anything. Henni lay there surrounded by help but was alone in performing the miracle, in giving you life. When the midwife at last lifted you up and you opened your eyes and fixed them on me, limbs flailing as though you wanted to be nailed to life before you collapsed in weary exhaustion, it occurred to me that Granny was not dead in the irreplaceable sense of the word. She had, because her time was up and yours had come, yielded her place.

Only later, as we lay with your small, tired body between us on a waterbed in an adjoining room, did I tell your mother that her grandmother was gone, and we wept together. But the tears were not all bad. I think we both thought that one cannot always keep and at the same time get. It was a fine thought, strange and difficult.

Afterwards, as I wandered high on your birth through the fresh snow in the still of the Oslo night on my way home to your brothers and sister, I swear I saw a shooting star flash as Granny's soul set out toward that heaven she had always believed in so strongly and unshakeably and trustingly.

When you were six or seven years old and we told you about that night, about how your great-grandma died at the same time as you were born, you questioned us about her voice and her eyes. That's often your way of judging people, by listening to the timbre and pitch of their voice, by reading intentions and emotions in their looks. They can be angry, mean, or nice, and now you wanted to know if Granny had a nice voice and kind eyes. We told you as best we could about a wise woman with good hands and the very best pancakes. You reacted as so often before by asking for an expanded reply that would enable this new information to be incorporated into your own context, because it seems that you can only relate in a meaningful way to people you are able to regard as contributors or participants in your own life. Sometimes it's as though the others are little more to you than passing incidentals in the general distracting hubbub of life.

— Can Great-Grandma see that I feel like crying when I think about her? Will I get to meet her when I'm an old man and die and go to heaven? Even though I know that's a long time off?

The question was typical of you: despite the fact that it could only take place in the beyond, and a long time from now, you needed to establish a relationship on your own premises, within your own context, otherwise you would have had problems in distinguishing Granny from the rest of the hubbub.

We answered yes to your question, though we've no idea whether there is a heaven that welcomes the dead. We answered yes, because sometimes it's more important to preserve contexts than to tell the truth.

THE BEST WAY
OF PRESERVING
contexts
is
by
remembering
things
that
want
to
be
remembered
by
us.
That
might
seem
a
strange
way
to
express
it,
but
all
I'm
trying
to
say
is
that
we
select
carefully
the
memories
we
store.
Whether
we
make
the
selection
ourselves,
or
whether
it
happens
of
itself
as
we
encounter
the
world,
isn't
easy
to
say.
Whatever,
we
cannot
remember
everything
that
is
true,
exactly
what
words
were
spoken,
which
shade
of
green
the
grass
was
in
May.
That
is
to
ask
for
an
impossible
security.
On
the
other
hand,
we
can
take
memory
cables
and
connect
them
to
ourselves
across
dim
chasms
of
time,
and
we
can
build
bridges
across
great
reaches
of
old,
unknowable
time
by
imagining
the
world
as
it
offers
itself
to
our
memory.
That
way
we
ourselves
can
also
be
remembered,
be
incorporated
by
others
into
a
sequence
that
is
meaningful.
The
truth
is
intractable;
it
makes
brutal
sense
like
ice
and
steel,
not
soothing
sense
like
contexts
do,
even
though
they
may
be
untrue.
Think
of
the
tree
in
our
garden
—
it
carries
not
truth
but
stories
of
who
you
were
when
you
climbed
up
and
hid
yourself
in
it,
carved
your
name
in
it,
dreamt
of
silver
and
golden
treasures
under
it.
The
tree's
roots
are
like
channels
through
which
your
stories
filter
into
other
trees,
other
names,
other
stories.
I
imagine
the
trees
holding
the
world
together,
Gabriel,
holding
it
in
an
underground
grip,
a
lattice
of
rooted
fingers,
and
remembering
for
us.
If
you
press
your
ear
to
the
ground
you
can
almost
hear
the
stories
murmuring
in
a
chorus
that
obliterates
yours
and
mine
and
sweeps
us
into
all
the
others.

This is hard for you. For you, contexts can and must only be true, because you confuse them with logical structures, chains of cause and effect in which each link is unambiguous and inviolate. You have no faith in thoughts that develop from a flimsy base of possibilities, not even likelihoods. You dislike experiencing a mental progression that takes place in uncertainty, and you guard against building your own sense of belonging on the unreliable sense of belonging of others. Is that why you so often stand alone in a corner and reach out as though in longing toward the play of others, toward lightness of heart, but without taking part? Does it hurt so much to let go?