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.
Sweetness
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.