Somewhere Over the Sea Read online

  Copyright © Font Forlag AS 2006

  First published in Norway by Font Forlag AS

  Published by agreement with Hagen Agency AS, Norway

  First published by House of Anansi Press Inc. in 2007, under the title Dear Gabriel

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  This edition published in 2012 by

  House of Anansi Press Inc.

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  Toronto, ON, M5V 2K4

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  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Freihow, Halfdan W. Somewhere over the sea : a Father’s letter to his autistic son / Halfdan W. Freihow ; Robert Ferguson, translator.

  Translation of: Kjære Gabriel. Previous titles: Dear Gabriel : letter from a Father ; Dear Gabriel : letter to an autistic son.

  eISBN 978-1-77089-193-7

  1. Freihow, Halfdan W. 2. Autistic children—Biography. 3. Parents of autistic children—Biography. 4. Autistic children—Family relationships. 5. Fathers and sons—Biography. I. Ferguson, Robert II. Freihow, Halfdan W. Dear Gabriel. III. Title.

  RJ506.A9F7413 2012 618.92’85882 C2011-907010-3

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2011940448

  Cover design: Alysia Shewchuk

  Cover photograph: Kjetil Hervik

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

  SOMEWHERE

  OVER THE SEA

  A FATHER'S LETTER TO HIS AUTISTIC SON

  HALFDAN W. FREIHOW

  TRANSLATED BY ROBERT FERGUSON

  CHAPTER ONE

  A seagull meditates on the ridge of the boathouse.

  It stands out in grey and white against the moss, which is old, green and speckled brown with age. For fifty years now that clump of moss has clung on there, sheltered from the north wind, just to give colour and texture to the dull slabs on the roof. It’s beautiful, and somewhere in the universe it probably makes sense.

  Now the bird is done with its contemplating and dives down into the water, down to its secret supply of cold, wet food. Beyond that, I imagine, it has no plans.

  The sea lies still today. It’s sluggish, almost dead. The horizon stretches from sea to sky in a diffuse span that at times bewilders me. I know better who I am when sky and water are distinguishable, when there are limits and obstacles, when I know what is mine, when I can see where I belong.

  It rained again last night, and I see the boat needs bailing out. And on the southern wall of the boathouse, the paint is flaking off, I see that too, where the rain streams, runs, holds on, doesn’t whip as it does on the north side, peppering the wood with salt and brushing it to a hard, smooth gloss.

  I’ll bail out the boat. Today I’ll bail out the boat. Come spring we should fix the boathouse.

  I SIT HERE AND SEE all this from my study, Gabriel, all these things that happen just because they take place, because all things must find their place in order to happen. There are other landscapes, placeless landscapes where nothing happens, or where everything happens so fast and simultaneously that things become homeless in them. But here, in my study, I sit and I contemplate belonging. Not yours or mine, but a larger sense of belonging that invests this slow and patient landscape and enables us to lean against it as against a wall, though it’s nothing more than air and water and the cry of seagulls, when our own vulnerable sense of belonging fails.

  We need a wall at our backs, you and me. Sometimes a stroke from the palm of a hand is enough. At other times we need to erect huge edifices of insight and comprehension in order not to fall, plunge into bewilderment, foolishness, and fear. At times we are each other’s wall, sometimes you are mine, but often I have to be yours alone, for you stumble and fall so easily. And sometimes that scares me, Gabriel, when I have nothing to hold on to myself, nothing to cling to, only wind and light and open sea, and you tumble beyond any comprehension.

  WE DON’T TALK ABOUT any of this out in the garden, when you’re home from school and the rabbits have been fed. Things like how fortunate we are to have each other and to live out here where the landscape is alive and tangible, we talk about only in our surplus moments, by the bedside when all is to be reconciled, or in the car, when glass and steel and high speed keep the world at bay. The good and the difficult each have their time, and we shouldn’t confuse their moments. At home, after school, we need to concentrate on the usual, things we might as well have talked about yesterday without noticing any difference, and that’s why we stroll across the lawn and chat about the animals, about what you want for Christmas, about what we’ll have for supper. Conversing about things like this, things that effortlessly concern us both because they are down-to-earth and familiar, helps to maintain a level of control over these early evening hours that threaten to tear and burst now that there’s no timetable to structure them, now that time doesn’t have any place for us to be.

  Then I might point to the boathouse and ask if you can see how worn out the roof looks. It’s almost as though the ridge has a kind of fracture in the middle, I say, as though some heavy clouds have weighed down on it, or some very heavy air has been lying up there . . .

  But your eyes reject this completely, and I realize that this was wrong.

  — Air can’t be heavy! Air weighs nothing, you say, half indignant at your father’s ignorance, half afraid he might be joking, that this is a joke and that you therefore should be laughing.

  You shake it off, don’t pursue it. But a couple of hours later, as I’m clearing away the dinner table and we’re waiting for children’s TV to start, you still haven’t forgotten.

  — Yes but, Dad, why did you say there must have been some heavy air weighing down on the boathouse? Don’t you know that clouds and air weigh nothing? Air is as light as anything! Here, look. And you lift up a handful, to demonstrate.

  — Why did you say that, Dad?

  — Well . . . I don’t know . . . because.

  I fumble and hesitate, for sometimes I need the small words, the seconds it takes to find an answer, to work out a strategy that will take your curiosity and confusion seriously without opening one of those endless why-discussions that don’t get us anywhere, because you respond to all my answers with new questions.

  — I was just joking, I say. Right then it’s the best answer I can come up with.

  — Just joking! It’s not even true!

  You no longer use your ordinary talking voice, you almost shout. I see in your eyes that you’re unable to make sense of this conversation, that you feel wronged and that this might end very badly. You need help, but not humiliating help, to escort you out of the logical dead ends in which you fumble, confused to the point of hopelessness because you can’t find the way out. You’re not capable of reconciling an obvious absurdity, a lie, quite simply, with your instinct
ive belief that whatever Dad says must be true. And you are absolutely unable to entertain the possibility that you yourself are mistaken, have been mistaken for as long as you can remember, that air can in fact weigh so much that it threatens to break the roof of an entire boathouse. Paralyzed by a limitless need to feel safe, for assurance that the world makes sense, that everything has its ordained place in unbroken chains of cause and effect, that everything is as it usually is, you need a bridge, a hand to help you out of the labyrinth.

  — But perhaps, I suggest, the beam in the roof is so old and rotten that it’ll break under its own weight. What do you think? Should you and I go on an expedition to find out? Bring a torch and some hot chocolate to drink?

  — It’s not called that! You said it wrong!

  I hear a loud edge of panic in your voice and rewind swiftly, reviewing my sentences in search of what it was I said wrong. It takes a few moments, but then I get it.

  — Sorry, I didn’t mean expedition, I meant inspection. You’re quite right, we’re not going off exploring, there’s no treasure hidden in the boathouse, is there? What I meant was, let’s take a torch and something to drink and go on an inspection, make sure everything’s all right. Maybe we’ll have to put on a whole new roof, what do you think?

  You look at me with your very open eyes, just above and to the left of mine, a gaze so huge and at the same time so distant that I can’t grasp it and don’t know what it is you’re seeing. I don’t know whether you’re still disappointed and a little afraid that I could lie and say that air is heavy, or if you hesitate because you’re weighing up children’s TV against an inspection trip to the boathouse, which is in such poor condition that you’re not allowed to go in there alone, or whether you’re simply someplace else. A place I cannot locate, a place where I can’t reach you or know how you are, if everything hurts there or if nothing has any meaning, if you just take place there.

  But then you roar out a huge YES! and throw your arms around my neck, and there’s a presence in your eyes, a sudden accessibility, as though you’ve forgotten to be afraid, forgotten that you feel tricked, maybe even lied to. And then we do it, phone Mom at work to tell her what we’re going to do, find the cocoa and heat the milk and butter the bread. That is, I phone and heat and butter. You watch, but I don’t know whether you actually see, because once again you’re someplace else, a place where only you know what happens.

  WHEN A SEAGULL HAS FINISHED eating, what does it do? What does a full seagull do?

  I don’t have a clue. Perhaps it just flies away with its little seagull heart, heavy-bellied, and disappears somewhere over

  the sea. But one day it’ll die, that I do know, and yet another unsolved life, another unanswered question will be added to the swarm of riddles that surround us, frame us and define us — the people, the animals, and our landscape, the astonishing powers that cause enormous trees to rise from tiny seeds.

  I know many things, Gabriel. If I dig deep enough in my memory, I can even explain which laws of nature make it ­possible for thin, frail bird wings to carry heavily laden seagull bodies through the air. But most things I don’t know, and the most important things I will perhaps never learn, even if I read an entire library.

  And yet, every day, I tell you that the most important thing you can do is to learn. And I tell myself that the most important thing I can do for you is to help you and give you a desire to learn. When you one day read this, will you feel that I’ve tricked you, lied to you, as you felt I did about the boathouse roof? Perhaps you’ll be a grown man yourself when you read these lines, perhaps you’ll never bother. Perhaps you’ll first lose me, and then the grief you never understood, and finally remember only the comfort and security with a man you called Dad, who promised you that everything would be all right, until you believed him because you didn’t know any better, and because everything is better than despair. Perhaps.

  Imagine that — I don’t know who you are, I, who know you so well. I don’t know what you remember, you who cannot ­forget.

  THE BOAT CAN AT LEAST WAIT until tomorrow. And the boathouse that has endured gale-force winds, baking sunshine and sleet since before either of us were born, surely that can wait too? Until autumn maybe, or next year? Can’t it all just wait, the washing-up and the reading practice and the children’s tv?

  I do not ask because I expect or suppose you have an answer to give me. I ask because I too am sometimes perplexed and consumed by doubt. I ask because I don’t always know what is most important, because the large and the small become indistinguishable. I ask because time passes, but sometimes it stands completely still, and there are so many things I should have done with it. I ask because my love is strong and my grief is deep, and because they both take up so much space that I’m not quite sure what to do with them.

  I ask because I see you, on a fine summer’s day, sitting alone in the grass for an endless hour and studying a dandelion, yellow as egg yolk, and I don’t know what you’re thinking. I see your lips move as you minutely dissect the flower, but I don’t know whether these are words, or what words you might be whispering. I don’t even know if that’s joy I see in your eyes, a small bliss, or if it’s something else entirely. An urge to destroy, perhaps, to tear scrupulously apart? A need to expose the core of the flower, penetrate to its very heart? Or nothing, an emptiness that is not even absence of thought, not even flight from thought?

  I ask because I once took you to the circus. You were eight years old and had been looking forward to it for days. You were dazzled, thrilled by the excitement, the lights, the colours, and the sounds. During the interval we bought candy floss and went around the back to see the animals, and you nagged me until you got a green light-sword, and then we returned to the high-flying trapeze artists and the trained elephants. After a while I saw that it was all getting to be too much for you. Gradually, you lost or abandoned your interest and sat there gazing down into your lap, or at the red light-sword belonging to the little girl in the next seat, even when I tried to make you look up at the dogs jumping through hoops of fire, or the flames spouting from the fakir’s mouth. In the car on the way home I asked if you’d had a good time and you said it’d been fantastic. I asked you what you’d liked best, and you replied, without a moment’s hesitation, the two clowns with the ball. I didn’t respond then because I felt a sudden jolt of pain. There were, dear Gabriel, no clowns with a ball on the program that day. What you remembered best from your first experience of a circus was something that hadn’t happened. The clown memory was probably something you’d picked up from Tv, or overheard in some conversation about circuses at school. This is a kind of information you seem to archive automatically and probably unwittingly, to enable you to give a “correct” answer on some later occasion, in case anyone asks when your thoughts are occupied elsewhere, or in hibernation, or who knows where?

  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 did
n’t exist, and what are we to do with secrets that don’t exist?

  CHAPTER TWO

  Trees 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.