Rabih never does manage to control himself enough to get his point across. It will take a lot of time, and many more years of insight, before they properly master the art of teaching and learning.
But in the meantime Rabih’s criticism of his wife on the materialistic score is blunted by one seismic humbling development. Five years into their marriage, at a highly auspicious moment in the real estate market, Kirsten manages to sell their flat, secure a new mortgage, and acquire, at a very advantageous price, a light and comfortable house a few streets away, in Newbattle Terrace. The maneuver brings out all of her skills as a financial negotiator. Rabih observes her, up late at night checking different rates and up early sounding tough on the phone with estate agents, and concludes that he is exceptionally lucky to be married to a woman so obviously adept at dealing with money.
Along the way he also realizes something else. There may indeed be a side to Kirsten that is unusually alive to how others are doing financially and which aspires to a certain level of material comfort. This could be seen as a weakness, but insofar as it is one—and Rabih isn’t even sure it is—it is intimately related to a strength. The price that Rabih must pay for relying on his wife’s fiscal talent is having to endure certain associated downsides as well. The same virtues that make her a great negotiator and financial controller can also render her, sometimes—most particularly when he feels anxious about his career—a maddening and unsettling companion with whom to consider the achievements of others. In both scenarios, there is the same attachment to security, the same unwillingness to discount material criteria of success, and the same intelligent concern for what things cost. Identical qualities produce both amazing house deals and insecurities around status. In her occasional worries about the relative wealth of her friends, Kirsten is, Rabih can now see, exhibiting nothing more or less than the weaknesses of her strengths.
Going forward, once they have moved into their new house, Rabih endeavors never to lose sight of those strengths, even at times when the weaknesses to which they can give rise are especially apparent.
Children
Love Lessons
Having always imagined that they would have children one day, they decide, four years into their marriage, to stop preventing the possibility. After seven months they get the news beside the bathroom sink, in the form of a faint blue line within a cotton-backed porthole on a plastic stick—which doesn’t seem a wholly fitting medium to herald the arrival of a new member of the race, a being who might still be around ninety-five years from now, and who will come to refer to the two presently underwear-clad people with an as yet unbelievable sobriquet: “my parents.”
During the long months of the phoney war, they wonder what exactly they should be doing. Familiar with the difficulties of their own lives, they look on this as a chance to get everything right from the very start, beginning with the details. A Sunday supplement recommends more potato skins and raisins, herring and walnut oil, which Kirsten zealously commits herself to as a way of warding off some of the terror she feels at her lack of control over everything occurring inside her. While she is in meetings or on the bus, at a party or doing the laundry, she knows that just a few millimeters from her belly button there are valves forming and neurons stitching and DNA determining what sort of chin there will be, how the eyes will be set and which bits of their individual ancestries will make up the filaments of a personality. Small wonder she goes to bed early. She has never been so concerned about anything in her life.
Rabih often places his hand protectively over her belly. What’s going on inside is so much cleverer than they are. Together they know how to do budgets, calculate traffic projections, design floor plans; what’s inside knows how to build itself a skull and a pump that will function for almost a century without resting for so much as a single beat.
In the last weeks they envy the alien its final moments of complete unity and understanding. They imagine that in later life, perhaps in some foreign hotel room after a long flight, it will try to drown out the noise from the air-conditioning and dampen the disorientation of jet lag by curling up into itself in that original fetal position in search of the primordial peace of the long-lost maternal brine.
When she at last emerges after a seven-hour ordeal, they call her Esther, after one of her maternal great-grandmothers, and secondarily Katrin, after Rabih’s mother. They can’t stop looking at her. She appears perfect in every way, the most beautiful creature they have ever seen, staring at both of them with enormous eyes that seem infinitely wise, as if she had spent a previous life absorbing every volume of wisdom in the world. That wide forehead, those finely crafted fingers, and those feet as soft as eyelids will later, during the long, sleepless nights, play a not-incidental role in calming nerves when the wailing threatens to test parental sanity.
At once they begin to fret about the planet they have brought her into. The hospital walls are a sickly green; she is held awkwardly by a nurse and jabbed at by a doctor’s inquiring spatula; screaming and banging can be heard from neighboring wards; she’s alternately too hot and too cold—and in the exhaustion and chaos of the early hours there seems little else left for her but to weep without measure. The cries pierce the hearts of her desperate attendants, who can find no dictionary with which to translate her furious commands. Huge hands stroke her head and voices keep murmuring things she can’t make sense of. The overhead lamps emit a fierce white light, which her paper-thin eyelids are not yet strong enough to resist. The task of latching onto the nipple is like trying to cling for life to a buoy amid a raging ocean storm. She is, to put it mildly, a bit out of sorts. After titanic struggles, she eventually falls asleep on the outside of her old home, heartbroken to have left without keys, but comforted somewhat by the rise and fall of familiar breaths.
Never have they cared so intensely and conclusively about anyone. Her arrival transforms what they understand about love. They recognize how little they had previously grasped of what might be at stake.
Maturity means acknowledging that Romantic love might only constitute a narrow and perhaps rather mean-minded aspect of emotional life, one principally focused on a quest to find love rather than to give it, to be loved rather than to love.
Children may end up being the unexpected teachers of people many times their age, to whom they offer—through their exhaustive dependence, egoism, and vulnerability—an advanced education in a wholly new sort of love, one in which reciprocation is never jealously demanded or fractiously regretted and in which the true goal is nothing less than the transcendence of oneself for the sake of another.
The morning after the birth, the nurses discharge the new family without guidance or advice, save for one leaflet about colic and another about immunizations. The average home appliance comes with more detailed instructions than a baby, society maintaining a touching belief that there is nothing much that one generation can, in the end, reasonably tell another about life.
Children teach us that love is, in its purest form, a kind of service. The word has grown freighted with negative connotations. An individualistic, self-gratifying culture cannot easily equate contentment with being at someone else’s call. We are used to loving others in return for what they can do for us, for their capacity to entertain, charm, or soothe us. Yet babies can do precisely nothing. There is, as slightly older children sometimes conclude with serious discomfiture, no “point” to them; that is their point. They teach us to give without expecting anything in return, simply because they need help badly—and we are in a position to provide it. We are inducted into a love based not on an admiration for strength but on a compassion for weakness, a vulnerability common to every member of the species and one which has been and will eventually again be our own. Because it is always tempting to overemphasize autonomy and independence, these helpless creatures are here to remind us that no one is, in the end, “self-made”: we are all heavily in someone’s debt. We realize that life depends, quite literally, on our capacity for love.