He has fallen in love with her calm; her faith that it will be OK; her lack of a sense of persecution, her absence of fatalism—these are the virtues of his unusual new Scottish friend who speaks in an accent so hard to understand that he has to ask three times for clarification on her use of the word temporary. Rabih’s love is a logical response to the discovery of complementary strengths and a range of attributes to which he aspires. He loves from a feeling of incompleteness—and from a desire to be made whole.
He isn’t alone in this. Albeit in different areas, Kirsten is likewise seeking to make up for deficiencies. She didn’t travel outside Scotland until after university. Her relatives all come from the same small part of the country. Spirits are narrow there, the colors grey, the atmosphere provincial, the values self-denying. She is, in response, powerfully drawn to what she associates with the south. She wants light, hope, people who live through their bodies with passion and emotion. She reveres the sun while hating her own paleness and discomfort in its rays. There is a poster of the medina in Fez hanging on her wall.
She is excited by what she has learnt about Rabih’s background. She finds it intriguing that he is the son of a Lebanese civil-engineer father and a German air-hostess mother. He tells her stories about a childhood spent in Beirut, Athens, and Barcelona, in which there were moments of brightness and beauty and, now and then, extreme danger. He speaks Arabic, French, German, and Spanish; his endearments, playfully delivered, come in many flavors. His skin is olive to her rosy white. He crosses his long legs when he sits and his surprisingly delicate hands know how to prepare her makdous, tabbouleh, and Kartoffelsalat. He feeds her his worlds.
She, too, is looking for love to rebalance and complete her.
Love is also, and equally, about weakness, about being touched by another’s fragilities and sorrows, especially when—as happens in the early days—we ourselves are in no danger of being held responsible for them. Seeing our lover despondent and in crisis, in tears and unable to cope, can reassure us that, for all their virtues, they are not alienatingly invincible. They, too, are at points confused and at sea, a realization which lends us a new supportive role, reduces our sense of shame about our own inadequacies, and draws us closer to them around a shared experience of pain.
They take the train to Inverness to visit Kirsten’s mother. She insists on coming to meet them at the station, though it means a bus journey from the opposite side of town. She calls Kirsten her “Lambie” and hugs her tightly on the platform, her eyes closed achingly. She extends a hand formally to Rabih and apologizes for the conditions at this time of year: it is two thirty in the afternoon and already nearly dark. She has the same vivacious eyes as her daughter, though hers have an additional, unflinching quality that causes him to feel rather uncomfortable when they settle on him—as they are to do repeatedly, and without apparent occasion, during their stay.
Home is a narrow, one-storey grey-terraced house located directly opposite the primary school where the mother has been teaching for three decades. All around Inverness there are grown-ups—now running shops, drafting contracts, and drawing blood samples—who can remember their introduction to basic arithmetic and the Bible stories at Mrs. McLelland’s knee. More specifically, most recall her distinctive way of letting them know not only how much she liked them but also how easily they might disappoint her.
The three of them eat supper together in the living room while watching a quiz show on TV. Drawings that Kirsten made in nursery school march up the wall along the staircase in neat gilt frames. In the hall there is a photograph of her baptism; in the kitchen a portrait of her in her school uniform, sensible looking and gap-toothed at age seven; and on the bookshelf a snapshot from when she was eleven, bone-thin, tousled, and intrepid in shorts and a T-shirt at the beach.
In her bedroom, more or less untouched since she went to Aberdeen to take a degree in law and accountancy, there are black clothes in the wardrobe and shelves packed with creased school paperbacks. Inside the Penguin edition of Mansfield Park, an adolescent version of Kirsten has written, “Fanny Price: the virtue of the exceptional ordinary.” A photo album under the bed offers up a candid shot of her with her father standing in front of an ice cream van at Cruden Bay. She is six and will have him in her life for one more year.
Family folklore has it that Kirsten’s father upped and left one morning, having packed a small suitcase while his wife of ten years was off teaching. The sole explanation he provided was a slip of paper on the hallway table with “Sorry” scrawled on it. Thereafter he drifted around Scotland, taking up odd jobs on farms, keeping in touch with Kirsten only through an annual card and a gift on her birthday. When she turned twelve, a package arrived containing a cardigan fit for a nine-year-old. Kirsten sent it back to an address in Cammachmore, along with a note advising the sender of her frank hope that he would die soon. There has been no word from him since.
Had he left for another woman, he would merely have betrayed his wedding vows. But to leave his wife and child simply to be by himself, to have more of his own company, without ever furnishing a satisfactory account of his motives—this was rejection on an altogether deeper, more abstract, and more devastating scale.
Kirsten lies in Rabih’s arms while explaining. Her eyes are red. This is another part of her he loves: the weakness of the deeply able and competent person.
On her side, she feels much the same about him—and in his own history there are no less sorrowful circumstances to recount. When Rabih was twelve, after a childhood marked by sectarian violence, roadblocks, and nights spent in air-raid shelters, he and his parents quit Beirut for Barcelona. But only half a year after they arrived there and settled into a flat near the old docks, his mother began to complain of a pain near her abdomen. She went to the doctor and, with an unexpectedness that would deal an irremediable blow to her son’s faith in the solidity of pretty much anything, received a diagnosis of advanced liver cancer. She was dead three months later. Within a year his father was remarried, to an emotionally distant Englishwoman with whom he now lives in retirement in an apartment in Cádiz.
Kirsten wants, with an intensity that surprises her, to comfort the twelve-year-old boy across the decades. Her mind keeps returning to a picture of Rabih and his mother, taken two years before her death, on the tarmac at Beirut Airport with a Lufthansa jet behind them. Rabih’s mother worked on flights to Asia and America, serving meals at the front of the aircraft to wealthy businessmen, making sure seat belts were fastened, pouring drinks, and smiling at strangers while her son waited for her at home. Rabih remembers the overexcited near nausea he felt on the days she was due to return. From Japan she once brought him some notebooks made of fiber from mulberry trees, and from Mexico a painted figurine of an Aztec chief. She looked like a film actress—Romy Schneider, people said.
At the center of Kirsten’s love is a desire to heal the wound of Rabih’s long-buried, largely unmentioned loss.
Love reaches a pitch at those moments when our beloved turns out to understand, more clearly than others have ever been able to, and perhaps even better than we do ourselves, the chaotic, embarrassing, and shameful parts of us. That someone else gets who we are and both sympathizes with us and forgives us for what they see underpins our whole capacity to trust and to give. Love is a dividend of gratitude for our lover’s insight into our own confused and troubled psyche.
“You’re in your ‘angry-and-humiliated-yet-strangely-quiet’ mode again,” she diagnoses one evening when the car rental Web site Rabih has used to book himself and four colleagues a minibus freezes on him at the very last screen, leaving him in doubt whether it has properly understood his intentions and debited his card. “I think you should scream, say something rude, then come to bed. I wouldn’t mind. I might even call the rental place for you in the morning.” She somehow sees right into his inability to express his anger; she recognizes the process whereby he converts difficulty into numbness and self-disgust. Without shaming him, she can identify and name the forms his madness sometimes takes.