We learn, too, that being another’s servant is not humiliating—quite the opposite, for it sets us free from the wearying responsibility of continuously catering to our own twisted, insatiable natures. We learn the relief and privilege of being granted something more important to live for than ourselves.
They wipe her little bottom, time and time again, and wonder why they never really understood clearly before that this really is what one human has to do for another. They warm bottles for her in the middle of the night; they are overwhelmed with relief if she sleeps for more than an hour at a stretch; they worry about, and argue over, the timing of her burps. All of this she will later forget and they will be unable or unwilling to convey to her. Gratitude will come to them only indirectly, through the knowledge that she herself will, one day, have a sufficient sense of inner well-being to want to do this for somebody else.
Her sheer incompetence is awe-inspiring. Everything must be learnt: how to curl fingers around a cup, how to swallow a piece of banana, how to move a hand across the rug to grasp a key. Nothing comes easily. A morning’s work might include stacking up bricks and knocking them down, banging a fork against the table, dropping stones into a puddle, pulling a book about Hindu temple architecture off a shelf, seeing what Mama’s finger might taste like. Everything is amazing—once.
Neither Kirsten nor Rabih has ever known such a mixture of love and boredom. They are used to basing their friendships on shared temperaments and interests. But Esther is, confusingly, simultaneously the most boring person they have ever met and the one they find themselves loving the most. Rarely have love and psychological compatibility drifted so far apart—and yet it doesn’t matter in the slightest. Perhaps all that emphasis on having “something in common” with others is overdone: Rabih and Kirsten have a new sense of how little is in truth required to form a bond with another human being. Anyone who urgently needs us deserves, in the true book of love, to be our friend.
Literature has seldom dwelt long in the playroom and the nursery, and perhaps for good reason. In older novels, wet nurses swiftly bear infants away so that the action can resume. In the living room in Newbattle Terrace, for months nothing much happens in the outward sense. The hours appear to be empty, but in truth everything is in them. Esther will forget their details entirely when she finally awakens as a coherent consciousness from the long night of early childhood. But their enduring legacy will be a primary sense of ease with and trust in the world. The fundamentals of Esther’s childhood will be stored not so much in events as in sensory memories: of being held close to someone’s chest, of certain slants of light at particular times of day, of smells, types of biscuits, textures of carpet, the distant, incomprehensible, soothing sound of her parents’ voices in the car during long nighttime drives, and an underlying feeling that she has a right to exist and reasons to go on hoping.
The child teaches the adult something else about love: that genuine love should involve a constant attempt to interpret with maximal generosity what might be going on, at any time, beneath the surface of difficult and unappealing behavior.
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.