The Course of Love (13 page)

The parent has to second-guess what the cry, the kick, the grief, or the anger is really about. And what marks out this project of interpretation—and makes it so different from what occurs in the average adult relationship—is its charity. Parents are apt to proceed from the assumption that their children, though they may be troubled or in pain, are fundamentally good. As soon as the particular pin that is jabbing them is correctly identified, they will be restored to native innocence. When children cry, we don't accuse them of being mean or self-pitying; we wonder what has upset them. When they bite, we know they must be frightened or momentarily vexed. We are alive to the insidious effects that hunger, a tricky digestive tract, or a lack of sleep may have on mood.

How kind we would be if we managed to import even a little of this instinct into adult relationships—if here, too, we could look past the
grumpiness and viciousness and recognize the fear, confusion, and exhaustion which almost invariably underlie them. This is what it would mean to gaze upon the human race with love.

Esther's first Christmas is spent with her grandmother. She cries for most of the train journey up to Inverness. Her mother and father are pale and wrung out by the time they reach the grandmother's terraced house. Something is hurting Esther inside, but she has no way of knowing what or where. The attendants' hunch is that she is too hot. A blanket is removed, then tucked around her again. New ideas come to mind: it might be thirst. Or perhaps the sun, or the noise from the television, or the soap they have been using, or an allergy to her sheets. Most tellingly, it isn't ever assumed to be mere petulance or sourness; the child is only ever, deep down, good.

The attendants simply cannot get to the root cause despite trying milk, a backrub, talcum powder, caresses, a less itchy collar, sitting up, lying down, a bathe, and a walk up and down the stairs. In the end the poor creature vomits an alarming confection of banana and brown rice across her new linen dress, her first Christmas present, on which her grandmother has embroidered
Esther
—and falls asleep at once. Not for the last time, but with infinitely greater concern from those around her, she is violently misunderstood.

As parents, we learn another thing about love: how much power we have over people who depend on us and, therefore, what responsibilities we have to tread carefully around those who have been placed at our mercy. We learn of an unexpected capacity to hurt without meaning to: to frighten through eccentricity or unpredictability, anxiety or momentary irritation. We must train ourselves to be as others need us to be rather than as our
own first reflexes might dictate. The barbarian must will himself to hold the crystal goblet lightly, in a meaty fist that could otherwise crush it like a dry autumn leaf.

Rabih likes to play at being various animals when he looks after Esther in the early morning on weekends, when Kirsten is catching up on sleep. It takes Rabih a while to appreciate how scary he can appear. It has never occurred to him before what a giant he is, how peculiar and threatening his eyes might look, how aggressive his voice can sound. The pretend lion, on all fours on the carpet, finds to his horror that his little playmate is screaming for help and refuses to be calmed down despite his assurances that the nasty old lion has now gone away and Dada is back. She wants no part of him; only the gentler, more careful Mama (who has to be roused from bed in an emergency and is not especially grateful to Rabih as a result) will do.

He recognizes how cautious he has to be when introducing aspects of the world to her. There cannot be ghosts; the very word has the power to inspire terror. Nor does one joke about dragons, especially after dark. It matters how he first describes the police to her, and the different political parties and Christian-Muslim relations. . . . He realizes that he will never know anyone in such an unguarded state as he has been able to know her—having witnessed her struggling heroically to roll from her back onto her stomach and to write her first word—and that it must be his solemn duty never to use her weakness against her.

Although cynical by nature, he is now utterly on the side of hope in presenting the world to her. Thus, the politicians are trying their best; scientists are right now working on curing diseases; and this would be a very good time to turn off the radio. In some of the more run-down neighborhoods they drive through, he feels like an apologetic official giving a tour to a foreign dignitary.
The graffiti will soon be cleaned up, those hooded figures are shouting because they're happy, the trees are beautiful at this time of year . . . In the company of his small passenger, he is reliably ashamed of his fellow adults.

As for his own nature, it, too, has been sanitized and simplified. At home he is “Dada,” a man untroubled by career or financial worries, a lover of ice cream, a goofy figure who loves nothing more than to spin his wee girl around and lift her onto his shoulders. He loves Esther far too much to dare impose his anxious reality upon her. Loving her means striving to have the courage not to be entirely himself.

The world thereby assumes, during Esther's early years, a kind of stability that she will later feel it must subsequently have lost—but which in fact it only ever had thanks to her parents' determined and judicious editing. Its solidity and sense of longevity are an illusion believable only to one who doesn't yet understand how haphazard life can be and how constant are change and destruction. To her, for example, the house in Newbattle Terrace is simply and naturally “home,” with all the eternal associations of that word, rather than a quite ordinary house picked according to expedient considerations. The degree of repressed contingency reaches its apogee in the case of Esther's own existence. Had Kirsten's and Rabih's lives unfolded only slightly differently, the constellation of physical features and character traits which now seem so indelibly and necessarily coalesced under their daughter's name might have belonged to other entities altogether, hypothetical people who would forever remain frozen as unrealized possibilities, scattered genetic potential that never got used because someone canceled dinner, already had a boyfriend, or was too shy to ask for a phone number.

The carpet in Esther's room, a beige woollen expanse on which
she spends hours cutting out pieces of paper in the shapes of animals and from which she looks up at the sky through her window on sunny afternoons, will have for her the immemorial feel of the surface on which she first learnt to crawl, and whose distinctive smell and texture she'll remember for the rest of her days. But for her parents it was hardly predestined to be an impregnable totem of domestic identity: it was in fact ordered just a few weeks before Esther's birth, in something of a hurry, from an unreliable local salesman on the high street next to the bus stop who went out of business shortly thereafter. Part of the reassuring aspect of being new to the earth stems from the failure to understand the tenuous nature of everything.

A well-loved child is set a challenging precedent. By its very nature, parental love works to conceal the effort which went into generating it. It shields the recipient from the donor's complexity and sadness—and from an awareness of how many other interests, friends, and concerns the parent has sacrificed in the name of love. With infinite generosity, it places the small person at the very center of the cosmos for a time—to give it strength for the day he or she will, with agonizing surprise, have to grasp the true scale, and awkward solitude, of the grown-up world.

On a typical evening in Edinburgh, when Rabih and Kirsten have finally settled Esther, when her well-ironed cloth is by her chin, she is snug in her onesie, and all is quiet on the baby monitor in the bedroom, these two infinitely patient and kind carers retreat to their quarters, reach for the TV or the left-over Sunday magazines, and swiftly lapse into a pattern of behavior which might rather shock the child were she miraculously capable of observing and comprehending the interactions. For in the place of the soft, indulgent language
Rabih and Kirsten have been using with their child for many hours, there is often just bitterness, vengeance, and carping. The effort of love has exhausted them. They have nothing left to give to one another. The tired child inside each of them is furious at how long it has been neglected and is in pieces.

It isn't surprising if, as adults, when we first start to form relationships, we should devotedly go off in search of someone who can give us the all-encompassing, selfless love that we may once have known in childhood. Nor would it be surprising if we were to feel frustrated and in the end extremely bitter at how difficult it seems to be to find—at how seldom people know how to help us as they should. We may rage and blame others for their inability to intuit our needs, we may fitfully move from one relationship to another, we may blame an entire sex for its shallowness—until the day we end our quixotic searches and reach a semblance of mature detachment, realizing that the only release from our longing may be to stop demanding a perfect love and noting its many absences at every turn, and instead start to give love away (perhaps to a small person) with oblivious abandon without jealously calculating the chances of it ever returning.

Three years after Esther's arrival, William is born. He has a cheeky, winsome nature from the first. His parents will always remain convinced that only a few hours after leaving the womb, with apparent knowingness, he winked at them from his crib. By the time he's four, there will be few hearts he leaves entirely cold. There is sweetness in the questions he asks, the games he plays, and the repeated offers he makes to marry his sister.

Childhood sweetness: the immature part of goodness as seen through the prism of adult experience, which is to say, from the far side of a substantial amount of suffering, renunciation, and discipline.

We label as “sweet” childrens' open displays of hope, trust, spontaneity, wonder, and simplicity—qualities which are under severe threat but are deeply longed for in the ordinary run of grown-up life. The sweetness of children reminds us of how much we have had to sacrifice on the path to maturity; the sweet is a vital part of ourselves—in
exile.

Rabih misses his children with particular intensity when he's at work. In a setting marked by constant tension and professional maneuvering, the very idea of their trust and vulnerability seems poignant. He finds it almost heartbreaking to remember that there is a place not far away from his office where people know how to care properly about one another and where a person's tears and confusion, let alone lunch menu and sleeping position, can be of such deep concern to another human.

It can't be coincidental that the sweetness of children should be especially easy to identify and cherish at this point in history. Societies become sensitive to the qualities they are missing. A world that demands high degrees of self-control, cynicism, and rationality—and is marked by extreme insecurity and competitiveness—justly sees in childhood its own counterbalancing virtues, qualities that have too sternly and definitively had to be surrendered in return for the keys to the adult realm.

William is pleased by a panoply of things that the grown-ups around him have forgotten to marvel at: ant nests, balloons, juicy coloring pens, snails, earwax, the roar of a plane at take-off, going underwater in the bath . . . He is an enthusiast of a class of uncomplicated things which have, unfairly, become boring to adults; like a great artist, he is a master at renewing his audience's appreciation of the so-called minor sides of life.

He is a particular fan, for instance, of “bed jumping.” You've got to have a long runway, he explains; it's best if you can start out in the corridor with the bed covered with a huge pile of pillows and the sofa cushions from downstairs. It's crucial that you get your arms properly up in the air as you run towards the target. When older people like Mama and Dada have a go, they tend to hold back and
keep their arms down by their sides, or else they do that halfhearted thing where they kind of clench their fists and keep them up near their chest. Either one reduces the payoff quite a lot.

Then there are the many important questions that need to be asked throughout the day: “Why is there dust?” “If you shaved a baby gorilla, would it look like a human baby?” “When will I stop being a child?” Anything can be a good starting point for curiosity when you haven't yet got to the stifling stage of supposedly knowing where your interests lie.

He's not worried about seeming abnormal, for there is as yet, blessedly, no such category in his imagination. His emotions remain unguarded. He is not afraid—for now—of humiliation. He doesn't know about notions of respectability, cleverness, or manliness, those catastrophic inhibitors of talent and spirit. His early childhood is like a laboratory for what humanity in general might be like if there were no such thing as ridicule.

Sometimes, when the mood strikes, he likes to wear his mother's heels and her bra and wants to be addressed as Lady William. He admires the hair of his classmate Arjun and tells Kirsten with considerable excitement one evening just how much he'd like to stroke it. Arjun would be a very nice husband to have, he adds.

His drawings add to the sweetness. Partly it's their exuberant optimism. The sun is always out, people are smiling. There's no attempt to peer below the surface and discover compromises and evasions. In his parents' eyes there's nothing trivial whatsoever about such cheer: hope is an achievement and their little boy is a champion at it. There's charm in his utter indifference to getting scenes “right.” Later, when art classes begin at school, he will be taught the rules of drawing and advised to pay precise attention to what is before his eyes. But for now he doesn't have to concern himself with how
exactly a branch is attached to a tree trunk or what people's legs and hands look like. He is gleefully unconcerned with the true and often dull facts of the universe. He cares only about what he feels and what seems like fun at this precise moment; he reminds his parents that there can be a good side to uninhibited egoism.