Somewhere Over the Sea (3 page)

And yet no one has taught me better than you that there is a connection between all things.

You, apparently the least suitable of teachers. You who cannot, who dare not what the rest of us find exciting and challenging and demanding, all that is abrupt and sudden and unexpected, all that is breakup and change and transformation. You who even dislike surprises at home, at least when they're something other than presents, or news that we're going to do something we've done before that you know you like, and even then there had better be advance warning and plenty of time to prepare. Only such things as experience has accustomed you to — that you can expect small presents whenever Mom or
Dad comes home from a trip away, that broken things can be repaired or replaced, that stains can be washed out and wet clothes dried — only the unusual that has become usual because you've seen it happen so many times can you accept and
appreciate without thorough preparation.

But most things in life are unusual, Gabriel, most things happen for the first time. Will you ever manage to come to terms with this?

MANY YEARS AGO,
long before you were born, I took a parachuting course and was due to make my second jump. Mom was away at work or studying, and I had your sister with me. She must have been three or four years old. She watched wide-eyed as I stood in the enormous hangar and packed the parachute, guided by the more experienced jumpers, put it on, and was inspected by the instructors. I had arranged to have a woman at the jumping centre look after Victoria while I was in the air, and the three of us went out onto the runway.

I travelled a lot in those days, and Victoria often came along when Mom drove me to the airport. For your sister, there was an evident connection between accompanying Dad to a place where he boarded a plane, and the experience of him being away for
sev
eral days, if not weeks. A long, long time in a little girl's world.

On this occasion she didn't have Mom there to comfort her when I left, only a kind but strange woman to whom I had entrusted her, holding her by the hand. When she realized that Dad had not only packed a weird backpack and dressed up in strange clothes, but that he was also going to board the waiting plane, that in other words he was leaving her, perhaps to stay away for a long, long time, and that she was going to be left behind with this woman whom she didn't know, she began to cry. On my way up the steps into the plane I turned and saw the silent despair in her eyes. It cut straight to my heart, so that I completely forgot to be afraid of the unnatural and unreasonable thing I was about to do — of my own free will throw myself out of a plane that was in perfectly good condition, several thousand metres up in the air.

It was probably only because fear had been displaced by a stronger impulse to comfort and hold my little Victoria, but I managed to guide the parachute almost directly down onto the marked landing site. Your sister stood there, obediently staring up into the air, following the minder's pointing finger. When she caught sight of me, when she saw that it was Dad, the one who had just disappeared into a plane to leave her, a light that I will never forget spread across her face. First naked disbelief, then pure shining happiness.

In the years that have passed since you came to us, I have many times thanked God it wasn't you who was with me that day. Had you been the child I suddenly abandoned in the care of a strange woman, only to reappear so suddenly and unexpectedly from the sky, you would have plummeted into a deep and painful crisis. It would have been impossible for you to adapt, to accept such a gross breach of your deep-seated need for contexts, for predictabilities, for time to grow accustomed — for things to be, as you put it, the way they usually are.

When you were the same age as Victoria was that day on the runway, Gabriel, it was even difficult for you to accept that you were served spaghetti for dinner instead of the meatballs we had talked about at breakfast. Even though you liked spaghetti a lot better.

YOU WHO HAVE
TAUGHT
me about contexts — not just how they simplify and make life easier and more comprehensible, but also how they add a reliability to life, a unique, rhythmic beauty that is the very foundation of long-lasting love — you are also more than any other the one who has astonished me.

Time after time I have thought: Good God, he's going to do it, he's breaking his own rules, he's daring to do the unplanned, the unprepared, he's deliberately seeking out that which is not as it usually is.

I'm not referring to occasions when you don't understand social rules and conventions, like the time you stood behind me in the supermarket queue desperate to pass water, and were hurt and ashamed when I turned on you with anger in my voice because you had dropped your trousers to your ankles and stood there urinating in neat circles across the chocolate display. Or the time you walked out of the electrical goods store with Mom, your hands behind your back. She wondered why, and you proudly produced a portable
Cd
player, exclaiming, when you saw her eyes darkening:

— Yes, but no one saw anything!

No, no one saw anything, Gabriel, but then neither had anyone explained to you that stealing is wrong even when no one sees you. You know quite well that you've done something you shouldn't have when someone finds out about it; but actions that are not discovered and reacted to, actions that go unseen, you somehow don't recognize as being fully real. Not even when they are good: I often suspect that you do not know, until someone tells you, that you've been kind or clever. It is often said of people like you that they live in their own, closed world, but that isn't quite true. To an even greater degree than others, perhaps, you discover yourself only in interaction. Without all the rest of us to reflect your actions and your individuality, you are alone in the loneliest sense of the word.

No, I don't mean these or any of a hundred other situations. We gave up dwelling on such scenes a long time ago. Mom and I have since ceased to worry about scowling recriminations, vociferous complaints, rude accusations, nasty remarks . . . about how ill-mannered you are, how impolite, what bad parents we must be . . . poor child, imagine having a mother like that . . . isn't it terrible the way some fathers neglect their children . . . but, my dears, shouldn't he be in an institution?

Only on those occasions when bigger boys or adults let their ignorance affect you directly, on those rare occasions when they dare to hit you, or curse and threaten you, only then do I react, explosively, in furious outbursts that make most people back off. Then I feel, with an almost joyous fright, that I become dangerous, that I could hit, damage, and hurt. But most often we laugh it off, Mom and I, over a glass of wine in the evening. Over the years we have seen and heard so much insult, so many prejudices and ignorant remarks, that we've developed a kind of automated emotional response that enables us to transform them into good, funny stories.

And sometimes you are so pricelessly inappropriate that the laughter comes bubbling up by itself. On the way home from our holiday in Thailand, for example. It was late at night, and you staggered, drunk with sleeplessness and nausea, on board the Amsterdam plane, curly-haired, tanned, and beautiful as a little god, with your handpicked coconuts dangling from your fingers and a necklace of mauve orchids around your neck. We were on our way toward seat number forty-something at the rear of the plane when you came to a halt in the first-class cabin, looked around, caught sight of a glamorous model swathed in silk and sable two rows away, then resolutely marched over to her and vomited fourteen days' worth of ice cream, fizzy drinks, and fried rice all over her furs and Armani and bleached hair. A tactful and efficient air hostess sorted the situation out and you slept in my lap back there on seat
48f
, and I stroked your head and thought Bravo! and laughed all the way to Europe.

BUT I DON'T
MEAN
any of this when I say you astonish me. Stories like these, which can be funny and sad, even both at the same time, are not about astonishment, about the enigmatic contexts that make you so different that science has found it necessary to make up new words for them.

CHAPTER THREE

—
I
s it true that God lives in heaven?

— Why does no one know God? After all, God knows all people. Has anyone ever seen God?

— God doesn't exist. He died a very long time ago. He died on a cross. Before that, God lived.

— Oh yes, God exists, I forgot, he came alive again. He didn't disappear and vanish forever.

— God must really be magic if he can make people appear on the earth. Otherwise how could he do it?

— No, God isn't magic. God isn't a human being at all. You once told me that.

— But how could God have been born into the world when he was the one who made it? Wait, no, that's it, it was Jesus who was born. But aren't Jesus and God the same?

YOU ASK AND
YOU ASK
, Gabriel, but God, Jesus, and heaven aren't things I know much about.

It's not surprising that you should want to know. At school they tell you stories from the Bible, you're taken along to church on various occasions, and many of the people who live in the area around us have a strong faith in God that can't help but influence you.

Whatever I've said to you when you ask, I've said carefully, because questions like these have to be approached with caution. They are difficult for all of us, and they are full of sinister verbal traps. It's never easy to know what people mean when they talk about God and heaven. They might mean it literally, that an old man with a white beard lives up there and that he once spent six days creating the world. They might also mean it metaphorically, that God is an idea, something that exists only in our heads. For you who are so infinitely literal in your understanding and interpretation of the world, it must be an almost insurmountable trial to keep check of such multifarious concepts for which you have no tangible frame of reference.

You have an impressively large vocabulary, which you employ with exquisite precision. But in your sentences everything has to have its ordained and regular place, because you are dependent on words having and imparting a single, clear, and unambiguous meaning. You'll only smile condescendingly if, for example, we ask you to “hold your horses,” or explain that in order to make bread you have to “knead” the dough. And if someone asks you, when it is obvious that your hair is a little shorter, if you've cut your hair, you answer with friendly exasperation:

— No, I haven't cut my hair. I've been to the barber's.

There are certain expressions you've learned to accept, even though you probably think of them as being woefully imprecise. I remember well when you were smaller and I asked you, for example, if you could pass me the milk. “Yes,” you said, but without doing anything with the milk carton, because to your ears all I had done was ask if you were capable of passing it to me.

Now you are able to understand that certain questions like this can have an implied meaning, and you act accordingly, passing me the milk without requiring a specific request to do so. But you neither understand nor see the point of most linguistic oddities and tools — irony, satire, jokes, double entendres, sarcasm, and metaphor. To your ears they only serve to create distorted meaning, misunderstanding, and disorder. How to explain to you things like faith and sin, resurrection, and redemption? And, moreover, how to explain that these words, which you (and all the rest of us!) have such difficulties in understanding to begin with, have different meanings within different religions, and even for different people within the individual religions? And how to explain to you that for some other people these words don't mean anything at all, without that necessarily making them stupid or bad?

Then I choose, as I perhaps too often do, the simplest solution. All people are different, I say. Some believe in God, some in Allah, some in Buddha. Some others don't believe in any of them, and many people don't know what to believe. Me, for example. I don't know whether it was God who created nature, or whether nature created itself. I don't believe we go to heaven when we die, but I don't know. Nor do I know whether there is a hell where we will be punished for our sins, but I choose not to believe it.

THINKING AND KNOWING
are two very different things. You have understood that. Often, when you ask me a question that seems difficult to answer, I will say:

— I don't know.

You don't like to hear that, so you immediately follow up:

— But what do you think? Do you think it's true that the sun will explode?

— Yes, but in a very, very long time.

— Do you think I'll be in heaven by then?

— Yes.

— Do you think the angels and gods and so on can arrange for heaven not to catch fire?

— . . .

You want an answer. That's to say, I suspect you want confirmation of the fact that there is always an answer, regardless of what it might be. The content of the answer is often subordinate; above all you want to know that all questions have their answer. Because if there is not one — and only one — answer to each individual question, then how can the world make sense? How are you supposed to relate to a world that lacks answers?

You have no choice, son. I don't want to make things more difficult for you than they already are, but there is no way around it. Just as you have to live with the fact that all people know and believe and think in different ways about different things, and as a result there is no formula you can learn to tell you what a person is and you will have to accept that you will never get answers to everything, that very often there is no answer, no matter how hard you search, and that there will always be more questions than answers. Even for those who believe in God — that's precisely what they do — they believe.

To believe can mean several things. It can mean imagining something you cannot know, as when you believe that you'll be an astronaut when you grow up. It can also mean to trust, as when you say you have been given and not taken a marble at school, and I say that I believe you. And it can mean that something is likely, but not certain, as when I believe that Victoria will be angry if you go rummaging through her things. And then it can mean a mixture of all of these — to trust in something one cannot know but that seems likely. Perhaps it's something like that people mean when they say they believe in God.

I know this confuses you. First I tell you that you will never get answers to all your questions, because sometimes there just is no answer. Then I tell you that it isn't all that easy to believe either, since it's possible to believe in so many different ways that you don't know what to believe, or how.

So let's forget them for a moment, both the believing and the knowing. Let's instead think another thought. Let's pretend that the world is one enormous church, or a huge temple. You know what I mean, you like being in churches and temples. Let's suppose that every place in the world — every country and city and river and mountain and volcano and forest and sea and desert and jungle — that all of these places are inside a church that is as big as the whole earth. And that all of the life in all these places, everything that grows and breathes and crawls and walks and flies and swims, lives inside this temple that is so big that nothing can manage to survey it — not the animals, not the plants, not the birds, and not the fish. Not even the humans.

Because it isn't always necessary to survey, to understand. Sometimes all that is necessary is to accept. Sometimes it's necessary to do as you said to me once when I wanted to talk to you about something you thought was unpleasant:

— Can't you just think that thought away?

You were quite right. It took a while for me to understand, but it was wisely said; I understood that later. Sometimes you have to think your thoughts away, otherwise you'll just feel sad, or perhaps angry, or perhaps even a little crazy. As when you ask me why it isn't possible to make gold, or why Victoria was born before you, or why it isn't warm enough to sunbathe in spring, and I say that's just how things are. That is an answer you dislike, because you want everything to have an explanation. And yet now and then I can see in your eyes, in the tension that seems to let go, first from your shoulders and then your whole body, that you manage it — you think the thought away, and it does you good.

When I sit in a church, or a temple, I let go. I like it. I like to feel that here, in this building that is called holy, it is safe not to know what is true and what is a lie. Normally, at work, or at school, or at home, or in the shop, we have to think all the time about what is right and what is wrong. We have to know all the time, and always be in a position to explain why and how we know. But in a church you don't have to know. There you don't even have to believe anything at all. Perhaps it's because God is in there, and he is so mighty and wise that it doesn't help anyway to think your own small, human thoughts. Or perhaps not. I don't think it's all that important whether God exists or not. But there is something about these buildings that feels good, that brings peace and consolation and a calm joy — because in there it's possible to give up the need to know and instead be filled with a strange and good desire to give thanks and to enjoy.

Imagine then if the whole world were a church, or a temple. Then we could be anywhere — in Africa, on the beach, at home — and still find consolation and security. If everything that exists in nature, plants and water and stones and air, and everything that mankind has built and created — if everything were a church where you were allowed not to understand, not to believe and think, then we would be secure wherever we went.

You had a similar idea once yourself, when you were about to go on your first class outing and spend the night in an unfamiliar forest and were a bit anxious. Mom and I said we could come with you, but you protested:

— I don't need any grown-ups with me. Jesus can look after me; he can even walk on the water!

And then you added, just to be on the safe side:

— But perhaps you could ask him to take God and Buddha with him too? And the other one, what's his name, Anna?

YOUR NEED FOR
unambiguity and literal meaning can often seem unreasonable to others, but they are counter
balanced by some exceptional qualities: you are profoundly honest, sincere, loving, and fearless. These qualities are so highly characteristic of you that it's almost more correct to say that they are you. They form your natural, congenital defences. Without them you would have been . . . I hardly dare think the thought.

But these qualities are not something you have chosen to develop. They are not part of a strategy you've worked out in order to succeed or to be liked. You, who are so talented, are incapable of strategic thinking. It goes against your nature, against that part of your nature that does not understand that in their dealings most people act as if in a game, with unwritten rules that seem to be there to be broken, but not always . . . a system of changing conventions, dictated by circumstance, which is incomprehensible to you and therefore impenetrable.

If it were the case that you had consciously chosen to oppose this game, which can often seem so petty, but which most people nevertheless use when they deal with others — if it were the case that you consciously chose to reject it and instead face the world with an unconditional openness, you would have been courageous in the sense of daring and foolhardy.

But that's not the way it is. You have simply been given no choice. You know of no other way in which to relate to people; you lack the ability to dissimulate and to understand that there might be another way. It makes you vulnerable in a way most people find inconceivable. Moreover, it makes you what people
call difficult, because the others don't always know how to answer you, they don't understand you, they are unable to escape
the suspicion that you are the one who is playing with them, that you, the child, have an inexplicable and intolerable advantage over them, and that you must be overcome as a matter of urgency, if necessary by means of the most dirty and brutal tricks in the game.

Nevertheless, these qualities make you, above all, a great and fine person, Gabriel. An enrichment for those of us who know you, and a corrective. They make it a privilege to learn from you and a joy to educate — in everything that can help you to live with your own vulnerability and the bewilderment of others, everything that can shield and strengthen your own experience of happiness.

Ever since you began asking us about your difficulties, those things about yourself that seemed different to other people, your knotted thoughts, we have given them the name “problems.”
You use the word yourself too, sometimes in a way that may seem cunning and calculated, when you're caught doing something you know you're not supposed to:

— Oh yes, sorry, but you know me, I've got some problems.

But that happens only rarely. Usually you convey a profound distress when you talk about your problems, for behind this everyday word lie great and fathomless riddles like the frightening mysteries of the deep — the enigmatic reasons why you are not like others.

You have several times asked us if we're going to “fix” your problems. Without your having to explain the question we've understood that what you have in mind is some kind of cure, an unvoiced expectation that Mom and Dad will make your problems disappear. But, dear Gabriel, however much we might wish to, we cannot.

Of
course
we'll
do
all
we
can
to
help
you,
but
even
though
we're
both
adults
as
well
as
your
parents,
we
don't
in
fact
know
all
that
much
about
what
we
can
and
should
do.
We
know
what
we
have
read
and
what
we've
been
told
by
the
health
authorities
and
pedagogues
and
therapists,
but
often
they
don't
even
agree
with
one
another.
Some,
for
example,
think
that
a
change
in
diet
would
have
a
beneficial
effect;
others
suggest
we
use
special
methods
of
training
to
change
what
they
call
“undesirable
behaviour”;
still
others
maintain
that
medication
is
the
answer.