Somewhere Over the Sea (9 page)

He sits discussing safety routines and weather prospects for the winter with William, your cousin, who has started work on a ferry boat in the north of the county. You lean up against Grandpa's comfy body, want to be babied a bit yourself, and his big fist rests upon your head, and it's safe and pleasant when he strokes you. But he continues talking to William about things you don't understand, and you want more, you want to cuddle him and creep up into his lap and press your nose into the hollow of his neck even though you're a big boy, and he lets it happen, lets you climb and crawl on his mountainous body, but then that too gets to be too much. He lifts you down and you understand; you manage to check yourself, not to protest and make it embarrassing, make people think you're a little baby. You demonstratively pull your arm out of his hand and turn to leave, but in your haste you step on Balder's tail. He's lying on the floor and is so dark against it you can't see him. He yelps so loudly that even Victoria looks up from her mobile phone, and little Malin is afraid, and you run over to comfort her, but then you see that it's your treasures she's sitting and playing with on the rug. At that point, fortunately, the doorbell rings.

Your private jet has landed and the last guests arrive. Granddad immediately has to promise to tell you a bedtime fairy story; you can hardly wait for the continuation of what you heard in the summer when we visited them at their holiday home. Granny has brought a little present, and so have Aunt Liv and Aunt Ingeborg. It's true that you haven't seen any of them for a long time, but the presents you've never seen at all, so we have to realize that they're more important than telling how you're doing at school, or agreeing that yes, indeed, you really are a big boy now. Everyone smiles at this, and then they proceed into the living room to say hello to the others, and how nice it was last time we met, it must have been, can it really be, good grief how time flies.

In the kitchen, everything is ready. I ask your sister to tear herself away from her mobile for a moment and give the word to those sitting in the library. She's about to ignore the request, then registers that Granny is following the scene, and since she's the one who sends the monthly envelopes that pay the phone bill, Victoria jumps up and disappears down the corridor. Seconds later she's back, exasperated, but understanding in the way she shakes her head and rolls her eyes, and signals for me to come. I know that look, and I follow her. From the corridor she points into the toilet, and there you sit, on the floor, with the contents of your mother's makeup bag strewn around you, your face transformed into an extravaganza of lipstick, mascara, and cream in red, black, and white. With half a tin of gel you've styled your hair into a pyramid. A loud, anGRy
no
is on its way out of my mouth, but I manage to swallow it, replace it with a milder rebuke about how Mom is going to be sad and sorry, and begin to wash and clean you up. Most of the abomination is water-resistant, and by the time I'm finished and we go in to take our places you still look like you have some sinister skin disease, but that can't be helped. We've seen worse in this house before.

That isn't true of everyone sitting around the table, but no one says anything. Then they smile nevertheless and say well, well, we've all been children once, no getting away from that, I remember so clearly — and with that Grandma embarks on a tale about one of the many times when little Henni and her best friend had got up to some mischief you just wouldn't believe, and Granny nods meaningfully and adds, pointing at me, that him there, he wasn't such an easy lad either, trust me, and soon the whole table is buzzing with reminiscences and confessions of long ago. In moments of fumbling uncertainty like this it's often reassuring to take refuge in the past, in what, thank God, ended well, though for a while there we thought — because things that happened back then are no longer dangerous and don't count in the same way, because sometimes it's helpful to recall memories of bad things that happened in childhood since, beside making good stories, they reassure us that everything, without exception, passes.

While this collective and unbridled confession proceeds, and even Victoria and Alexander and Kai Henrik find inspiration and encouragement to admit to misdemeanours and infringements that Mom and I have neither heard of nor wish to know about, I look at you. You sit bent over your plate, your face and the spaghetti sauce like reflections of each other, apparently consumed by the food you're bolting down. But your whole body tells me that you hear each word that's being said, and that you're having trouble dealing with them. They muddy your picture of reality, these things you hear about Mom and me and Granddad and the others, and which everyone around the table just smiles and laughs at. Here, too many boundaries are being violated simultaneously — the gap between right and wrong; the difference between what you know you're allowed to do, and what you've been told you should be ashamed of and apologize for; the chasm between adults who know and children who haven't learned; the distinction between scolding and laughter; the fine and often imperceptible line between laughing at something that's funny and laughing at something that's stupid. You can't get any of these sums to add up. Nothing seems to be as you've learned it should be and usually is.

Perhaps it occurs to you, in an attempt to understand, that tonight there are no rules, or that none of them apply? Is that why you abruptly sit up straight and launch into a piercing sentence that contains all the ugliest words you know, and that soon contains no words at all, just atonal sounds, while you roll your eyes up into your forehead and plaster spaghetti from your plate into your hair and onto your face and clothes? Is it because this party was supposed to be yours and no one is talking with you or about you? Because there are, after all, too many people and voices, and too much noise? Because you feel offended without knowing why, and are therefore confused? Is that why you grab the glass on your right and, lightning quick, before anyone can react, the glass on your left, and with a sheepish look that pretends not to see what the hands are getting up to, empty them both into the pasta bowl?

— Gabriel!

Mom slaps your hand and takes you by the arm to lead you from the table, but it's too late now. There's no way back now, you're gone, furious and shocked, and you bite the joint of her thumb and kick yourself free and run off, and we hear shrieking and swearing from the corridor, and the front door closing with a bang.

Then all is still. I look at our large family seated around the table, I see how they try, a little embarrassed, to disguise their upset and outrage, and it strikes me that I've almost forgotten what it means to be upset and outraged. All I feel is grief, a grief that makes me nauseous and makes me want to close my eyes and let go.

Slowly the table comes back to life. Granny and Grandma start clearing away, carrying out, rinsing and loading the dishwasher, as if to wash clean the whole meal. And now everybody wants to help, because they must do something, get the evening back on track by performing practical tasks. Little Malin, three years old, wants to know why Uncle Gabriel was so angry, but they hush her and tell her to go off and play. The young, who strictly speaking are adults, probably want to laugh more than anything, it's so crazy, but they don't do so here. They say they're going for a smoke and head off down to the library. Victoria has a telephone to address, and Grandpa and Granddad sit on the sofa and make conversation about something.

Finally, Mom and I sit alone at the table. We look at each other and know that this is something we two have to live with, this is something no one else can understand or help us with, and this certainty is so strong and so necessary that we have to stand up and hold each other long and hard. Then we go, she out to the grandmothers in the kitchen, and me out into the night, to you.

WINTER IS ON
ITS WAY.
It's cold and dark, and you've run off. I didn't follow you straightaway, for I know that you need your time after a scene such as this. You need to be alone for the time it takes, while shattered chains of thought slowly link themselves together again, enabling you to create a sort of order that makes it possible for you to carry on thinking. But I'm freezing already, and all you were wearing when you disappeared was a shirt and no shoes.

Where shall I search for you? How shall I find you?

I start walking along the gravel path. There's no point in calling for you — even if you hear me over the wind, you won't answer. In the place you are now, it's all the rest of us who are guilty, we're the ones who started it, and the only one to feel sorry for is you. An answer to my call would be an admission, yet another humiliation. Wherever you are, you want to be found like a treasure.

Walking along casting purposeless glances into the night, I can't think clearly. I try to search, but at the same time I replay over and over again a recording of what happened, and rehearse what sentences to use when I find you. An ugly little thought-demon wants me to contemplate the very worst, that despair has driven you down to the sea to give up completely, and for a moment I'm terrified, but then immediately I get furious, warm, and strong, and I crush every little devil beneath my heel, crunch the gravel and these satanic skulls, smash every bone in the body of everyone who would dare to hurt my boy.

Then I turn, suddenly calm again, leave this meaningless battlefield and walk back toward the house. The guests and the party and the laughter light up the windows, but the light lies, for a great emptiness fills this house, an absence that takes up more space than all the people and all the objects and all the dreams.

I walk into the garden, stepping on wet winter grass, and I stop and look at the tree that stretches its rheumatic witch limbs toward the east, just about distinguishing them in black on black, and then I discover you, the outline of your body, kneeling and curved, folded into itself, on the ground inside the rabbit hutch.

You've sensed me; I know that without knowing. I walk over and sit down cross-legged outside the chicken wire that I don't see, only feel as an icy imprint on my forehead when I bend forward. You're not crying; you sit quite still. The shadows of four small rabbits scurry around you.

— My boy, I say.

— Yes, you say.

I stand up and open the hutch cover and wriggle inside, sit down in front of you. In the darkness your face is Indian and pirate, clown and wizard, but the eyes are Gabriel, large and beautiful and filled with prayer.

— Dad, you say.

— Yes, I say.

We hold each other, hold tightly on to the only thing that can help us, the other, and the rabbits lie down flat on the ground and the wind holds its breath.

— It was a stupid party, you say.

— Yes, I say.

And then you lower your gaze to the ground, modestly and gently, as though it were too heavy even for the globe itself to bear, and whisper:

— Do you think Granddad will still tell me that fairy story?

CHAPTER NINE

W
hen people first chose to settle here, I imagine that it was because the landscape spoke to them as it sometimes speaks to us. They didn't have to stay here, they could have continued northward, or inland, or gone south, they could have set sail and perhaps discovered America. But they didn't. They stopped, they looked around and listened, and what they saw and heard told them that they had arrived.

I don't know what it was that the rocky knolls and the grass and the waves said to them, or what language they spoke. Perhaps it was a beautiful song the people heard, perhaps it was a silence like they'd never experienced before. Perhaps it was a message from their Creator that danger threatened in every direction and that they had no option but to stay here. It's also possible that the light here drove the shadows from their hearts and in their place left a sparkling promise of happiness and freedom.

Perhaps all this, but it was surely the wind too, that blew them full of a riddle they would have to live ten thousand years to solve, while they patiently ploughed the fields and the ocean, sowed seed and bait, harvested corn and salmon. And this riddle is so huge that it encompasses all they have ploughed and sown and harvested, and the fields and the ocean and all they are and ever can be, and that itself is the solution, that is the answer they have left behind.

This is your landscape, Gabriel. Here you shall encounter the riddle yourself, and perhaps find your own answers, since ours are usually insufficient for you.

EVERYTHING IS LANGUAGE.
Language gives names to all things, and therefore you can acquire them through language. Acquiring is not the same as possessing, it's more like mastering, and since you can't possess all things, you can master them with the help of language. This is something you've understood by yourself. You find it just as self-evident that your world grows bigger the more things you can give a name to, as the fact that there is less white left on the drawing paper the more pencil lines you draw and the more strokes you make with the paintbrush.

This you know, regardless of how difficult language is, of how it's guided by rules that have neither overt reason nor evident logic. We've talked about this, and they make you laugh, all the strange thoughts one can have about language. For example, that there is no good reason why a glass can't be called a horse, or a sweater. You laugh, but you understand it, because although our dog is named Balder he might just as well have been called Rufsen or Tinka. Moreover there are many dogs named Balder, and some people too, so a name is just something we decide upon, it isn't the glass, or the horse, or Balder. But it's fun to see the look on Mom's face when you ask her for a horse of orange juice.

All the same, it's a big jump from understanding something, for example, that the words in language are arbitrary, that they might easily have been different, the way they are in other languages — to accepting without protest that this is simply the way it is, not to demand some better explanation or rationale. A jump like that involves a transgression of your conception of independence that you are usually reluctant to undertake. It's almost like a jump from equality to subordination.

— I know that's how it is, you say, — but I don't understand why it has to be like that always. Why can't I be allowed to think what I want?

And straightaway we're into one of those endless conversations in which your contributions are limited to: Yes, but why?

And yet you submitted without more ado to the peculiarities of language, like grass to wind and wave to beach. Was it perhaps because you knew intuitively that you needed language in order to pose questions about everything else? Or did you maybe find a secret symmetry, some invisible logic that appealed to you, in what to us seems a quite arbitrary concurrence between the world and the words we use to animate it by giving names to all things? Or — as I suspect every now and then — was it simply that the hunter and the collector in you discovered early that in language you had stumbled upon the richest treasure chest of them all?

It isn't important. The wind doesn't ask why the grass bends as though bowing, it just blows on. Nor does language want to know why it makes the world comprehensible; it just gives you more to comprehend.

THE LANDSCAPE OUT
HERE
is as big as language. In all directions the sky stretches into eternity, the ocean foams and breaks against coasts where it has other and unknown names, islands and skerries have roots deep in the earth and in time that was long before time began, and the wind, and all the innumerable things that grow because they are small and demand little, just a name that is unlike all other names, in order to exist.

The landscape out here is more precise than other landscapes in forests and mountains. It has so much space at its disposal, so much elbow room that we would have got lost in it if we didn't know exactly what it was called and where we therefore belong. It has so much weather to endure, the landscape out here, such powerful forces that we might have lost ourselves in it had we not had the names to cling to — one name in fog, another in storm, and many more in blinding sun and ice-cold moonlight, and nights that are so black you can touch them.

This is no landscape for tourists. It's a landscape to settle in, or to move on from, for one has to work one's way into it with reverence and patience, knoll for knoll, wave for wave, wind for wind. It's a tough landscape that wears down all opposition and survives every assault, for it lies so limitlessly open and exposed that it's unshakeable and impenetrable. It's a landscape of shifting otherness, hour by hour, day by day, and yet always, to the point of melancholy, the same.

It's a landscape that often reminds me of you, Gabriel. It's your kind of landscape.

IF ONLY WORDS
had been enough!

But they are not, because words also need to have a home somewhere, they need a circumstance, a context within which to order themselves. Like grass and people, words need a place of their own, or else they become placeless, and then they lose their meaning and we can't understand them.

This too you know. I can't teach you anything about how words need to belong either, for you know about it in the way one simply knows that certain things are impossible, or right, or necessary like air and blood, inexorable as the ebb and flow of the tides. You know that words must have a fixed place that is theirs and no one else's, but you know it so well that at times it seems a crippling insight — a knowledge you have elevated to a truth, to some law of nature that you dare not, cannot, break for fear of disturbing an order, a system, a context only you can see and that has made you its slave. At times your dependence on context is frightening.

One day as we were seated around the dinner table, Victoria asked permission to do something. I can't remember exactly what, but anyway, our answer was a firm and clear no. To which her response, with exaggerated gestures, was:

— Mamma mia!

You were instantly gripped by a violent and furious confusion, you screamed and wept, and then you lay down on the sofa and hid your head beneath a cushion, as though to hide your impotence. We didn't understand what had happened, had no means to follow you into the labyrinth and escort you back, for we had no idea of the cause of your reaction. Only later, when you had calmed down, did it emerge that it was Victoria's outburst: she had used the expression Mamma mia wrongly. You knew the
ABBA
song, and that expression belonged there and nowhere else. By using it to emphasize her frustration with us, Victoria had broken your law governing the fixed context of all words, and this transgression violated your understanding of language in a way that was unacceptable to you. For you, the context of words is as holy and sacrosanct as their meaning.

YOU KNOW MANY,
MANY WORDS
, Gabriel. You know what they mean, the difference between them down to the slightest nuance, and you use them meticulously, diligently, and cautiously, and almost never get them mixed up. Synonyms aren't for you interchangeable words that have the same meaning; they are independent words and mean different things that only resemble each other. No word can mean exactly the same as another, for in a specific context all things can have only one word. Otherwise language would be nothing but what you call chaos and jumble, and impossible to use. For you, each individual word has an intrinsic value precisely because it cannot and should not be confused with any other.

You use words as specialized tools. When you talk, you practise precision mechanics. You can embark on a sentence, a complicated, many-layered piece of reasoning, but near the end you'll often stop and reconsider, shake your head and say no, no, no, that's not what I meant, and then start all over again in order to replace a word in the middle with one that is a little more precise and appropriate to the context. You're like a writer who, having completed a whole page on the machine, discovers a typo in the middle and therefore tears the page out of the typewriter, throws it away and starts anew because he can't bear to see a small, insignificant mistake spoil the textual image. Had you been a wind blowing across a desert, you would have turned back and blown all over again if a single grain of sand you'd swept over on your way had rolled too far, or not far enough.

In many ways, Gabriel, it's a gift to master words and their meanings individually and in context the way you do. It's a gift that has also brought me great pleasure. I, who for many years have earned a living working with language and thought I knew a good deal about it, have learned more about the value and need for precision and nuance by following your process of linguistic maturation than from most of the books I have read. Because you never content yourself with an approximate answer, you won't put up with sentences that are merely there or thereabouts, that are not the exact, optimal, and literal expression of what you want to say.

But unfortunately language isn't always literal, no more than words are always faithful to the context in which you first encountered them. Language cannot always be literal, because then we wouldn't be able to develop and change and enrich it by forming new words and adjusting the meaning of the old ones. Language is, moreover, a toy as well as a tool. Will you ever be able to accommodate that? Will you manage to come to terms with the fact that language can be used for more than giving things the right name in the right contexts, that it can also be used to play with the things and the contexts, to joke and to fool about with? That it is quite possible to say something in a way that turns its meaning into the opposite of what one is actually saying? That words can be lifted from their contexts and placed in others, thus acquiring new, unexpected, and amusing meanings? That it is possible to make pictures with words just as one does with colours and pencils, and that the finest pictures are often the result of mixing words to make new ones, just as you mix colours? That it's okay to experiment, and that a failed word image can be thrown away just like a drawing you haven't got right?

Now and then you tell us jokes that you've heard at school and expect us to laugh at them, but you do not laugh yourself. Or you laugh without laughing, because you've understood that jokes are to be laughed at. Nor do you laugh at word games, although you sometimes play them yourself, innocently, and unintentionally, as when Victoria told you she was going to the kiosk to buy a ticket for the Viking lottery, and asked if you wanted to go with her. You didn't reply at once; first you had to know:

— Does that mean I can win coins from the Viking Age?

Will you learn to play and joke with words? The landscape plays with us all the time. The clouds are faces and scary animals, but they don't stop being clouds. The sea is glittering gold in the sunset, but it doesn't stop being the sea. The tree in the garden has gnarled witch's claws and an eagle has landed on the outermost islet, but you know that what you see are dry branches and a pointed rock. Words aren't dangerous to play with, Gabriel; they retain their usual meanings even though from time to time we lend them other new and strange meanings. It doesn't matter if you sometimes want to drink a horse or a sweater of orange juice — that doesn't stop the glass from being a glass.

THE LANDSCAPE OUT
HERE
talks to us, but it can also be read, almost like our palms. Wherever you look, memories are etched into it like writing. You read a minor clause in the landscape's diary when you turn over a stone on the ground and the exposed pallor tells you how long it has been lying there, and you gulp down entire chapters each time you let your gaze sweep over the skerries' polished grey-black tide line. Moment by moment the wind spells the weather in water and grass, and the sun never stops counting the days. The landscape keeps a careful log in its elegant hand, so that we can read about what has been and prepare ourselves for what is to come, so that we may know where we are and determine whether we have any reason to be here. Sometimes I picture the landscape as a written warning.

You who talk and talk, why have you hesitated so long to read and write? The letters, which are so orderly, which each have their own sound, unlike all other sounds, and which in all conceivable contexts — in every word — have their fixed, unchanging places. For a long time you've known all the letters, you've know the sounds they stand for, and you've been aware that when you put one sound after another they turn into words and sentences. Is it because you couldn't believe it was that easy? That there had to be some aspect of the art of reading and writing you hadn't understood? Is that why you insisted for so long that you couldn't do it? Even though you sometimes, at moments when you'd forgotten that you couldn't, actually read — a sign, a newspaper headline, an advertising bill. Given your keenness to learn, and your infinite curiosity, and all the questions you knew there were answers to in books, your reluctance was a mystery. Yet another mystery.